Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  “Do you have any radblasted idea what ten kilos of C-4 can do?” the musician asked Ryan as they trotted.

  “Rough idea,” Ryan said.

  “Then why the hell aren’t we running faster?”

  “We’re waiting until we’re a little ways from the building,” Ryan replied. “Don’t want to raise suspicions and get ourselves machine-gunned from behind. Okay, Jak, that’s far enough. Let’s pour it on.”

  The albino youth immediately picked up the pace, his arms pumping, long white hair flying out straight behind him.

  The others strained, high-kicking, so as not to be left behind. The sun hammered against Ryan’s head and shoulders. The weight of his pack and longblaster came down hard on their respective straps, rasping into his flesh on every footfall. The sound of seven pairs of tramping boots was muffled by the mud’s friable crust. Those at the rear of the file fanned out a bit to avoid the dust cloud raised by the runners in front. Even so, Ryan tasted dirt in his mouth, and grit crunched between his teeth.

  Nobody said a word.

  They were all too busy breathing, struggling to hold position. Chins up, eyes straight ahead, this was a grim, silent race against time, a race against their luck finally running out. To Ryan it felt like a blaster muzzle was pressed hard to the back of his head, a live round chambered, and someone’s finger curled around the trigger.

  Any second.

  Any nukin’ second the wave of destruction would come, a wave so hot it would scramble the nerves of back and brain, so hot it would feel cold.

  And then the black.

  Forever.

  The end of the parking lot and the line of trees at the edge of the golf course grew steadily closer. What was a safe distance? Who knew? Long minutes passed. Three. Four. Five. At minute four, Ryan’s thighs began to ache; his legs felt like lead. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face and trickled along the middle of his back. By five, everyone was huffing and puffing, even Jak.

  After six minutes of all-out sprint, they crossed the ruptured road and reached the start of the golf course.

  Ryan hazarded a glance back over his shoulder, to measure the distance they’d come. He guessed it at a little more than seven hundred yards. Before he could face front again, it all went to hell.

  There were two almost simultaneous detonations: a relatively small one at the edge of the parking lot on his left shot straight up in the air like a volcanic eruption; the other, an enormous one inside the box store volcanoed and went sideways in all directions. The horizontally spreading blast ring lifted the parking lot mud twenty feet in the air. In a blinding flare of light, the store’s concrete-block walls vanished; and the Winnies disintegrated in the same microsecond. Before Ryan could bat his eye, the larger explosion swallowed up the smaller.

  The shock and sound wave struck him in the same instant. He was unprepared for their power; in truth, there was no way to prepare for it. The explosion made the ground fly up and smash him in the face. One moment he was running, the next he was on his stomach, seeing stars and tasting his own coppery blood. He wasn’t alone, everybody was thrown violently to the earth.

  As the sound boomed past them, Ryan scrambled to his feet. He heard someone gasping for air.

  “Nukin’ hell,” J.B. wheezed as he got up. “I think I cracked a rib.”

  Where the predark mall had been, a vast column of roiling dust and smoke uncoiled into the blue sky.

  “There’s nothing left of it,” Krysty said in awe. “It’s all gone.”

  Not quite true.

  Huge chunks of debris from the store began falling through the smoke, clusters of still-joined concrete blocks crashing onto the parking lot. The lighter debris flew even farther from ground zero, as if it had been fired from a catapult. Pieces of asphalt, metal and rock sizzled down around them, bouncing on the grass.

  “We need to move farther away!” Ryan said. “Go, Jak! Go!”

  They ran deeper into the golf course, out from under the debris fall. J.B. dropped behind at once, cradling his rib cage on the left side. He couldn’t keep up because he couldn’t take a full breath. To run any distance required air. Lots of air. Ryan knew it had to have hurt like holy hell. J.B. was not a groaner by nature, but he groaned with each footfall. Seeing how badly his old friend was banged up, Ryan quickly relieved him of his pack and hung back to jog alongside him.

  Jak led them up a familiar rise, through the grove of trees and down the slope to the shore of the chartreuse-matted water hazard.

  At the edge of the lake, they all sat, exhausted.

  First thing, Mildred had a look at J.B.’s ribs.

  “I heard something go snap when I hit the ground,” he told her, holding open his shirt. “It’s hard to breathe deep…”

  “You might have cracked one,” she said. “Or maybe it’s just a deep bruise. Either way all I can do is wrap you up to immobilize it.” She pulled a bandage roll from her medical kit and started binding his chest in tight, overlapping turns.

  As she was working, the musician lifted his head from between his knees and addressed the one-eyed man. “Where’s the rest of my C-4?” he said.

  “Mebbe you’d better explain how you figure it’s yours before we get into whether there’s any more of it,” Ryan told him.

  “You want an explanation? Sure, I’ll give you the whole story. I heard about a predark C-4 storage site from a scrounger who’d just come back from the New Mex hot zone. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d stumbled onto. The triple stupe couldn’t read a lick. He thought the packaged kilos might be worth something, though. He came to me with the information and a sample of the stuff because he didn’t trust BoomT to give him an honest deal. I hired a full bike crew to go back to New Mex with him. Took a big risk and staked them gas, food and ammo to go get me a load of plastique. That’s why I’m here with my ship. I skipper a forty-foot sloop, working the coast route up into the Lantic. I’ve been waiting to make the exchange for the explosive, and then to personally deliver it to my buyers.”

  “East Coast barons?” Mildred said.

  “Nah,” the musician said. “I’m not sailing east with it, I’m sailing west. You ever hear of Padre Island?”

  “Rumors,” Krysty said. “Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Grounded freighter, fully loaded, on the southwest edge of the Houston radpit.”

  “To be more precise, my dear, what we’ve heard is rumors of rumors,” Doc corrected the tall redhead. “We’ve never actually made the acquaintance of anyone who claimed to have visited that particular garden spot, only people who claimed to know people who claimed they knew people, and so on, and so on. Smoke and mirrors, not to put too fine a point on it.”

  “We don’t put much stock in things we haven’t seen for ourselves,” Ryan told the man with the mustache.

  “Well, I’ve been there regular, mebbe twenty times total,” the musician countered, “and I’m telling you it’s as real as you and me. The islanders have brand-new predark goods coming out their ears. They’re ready to trade plenty for something this extra special. Once they’ve got it, they’ll cut it up into little chunks and sell it for ten times my price. But hey, that’s business.”

  “So if these people are paying you,” Ryan said, “you can pay us.”

  “I’ll give you just what I was going to give the coldhearts I hired. I paid them half up front. Promised to pay them half on delivery. I’ll give you the delivery part of what I agreed to.”

  Over the man’s shoulder, submerged not thirty feet away, was the disputed stash.

  “That isn’t good enough,” Ryan said. “We want half of whatever the islanders are going to pay you.”

  “Are you kidding? You want me to make you partners?”

  Ryan’s expression said he wasn’t kidding, and that was exactly what he wanted.

  “Without us, you’ve got nothing,” Krysty said. “And you’re out all your upfront costs. With us you’ve got fifty kilos of C-4 to trade.”

  “S
o there is more of it,” the musician said, a wide smile lifting the corners of his drooping lip shrubbery.

  “We need you, and you need us,” Mildred told him. “That’s what partnerships are made of.”

  After a moment of consideration, the companions had their answer. “All right,” the musician said, “I’ll admit you’ve got me.”

  “We need ammo for our blasters,” Ryan told him. “Nines, .38s, .357s, 9 mm and 12-gauge.”

  “Not a problem. I’ve got a good selection of new—not reloaded—cartridges stowed away on my ship. It’s islanders’ ammo, from their stockpile. The bikers were going to take it as part of their pay. You can help yourselves.”

  “And you’re taking us with you to Padre,” Krysty declared.

  “Of course. We ship together until the deal is finished. Afterward we go separate ways. Now, where’s our C-4?”

  By way of an answer, Ryan started unlacing his boots. Jak did the same. Then the two of them waded out into the lake to retrieve the sunken treasure.

  As they dropped five dripping packs onto the shore, the musician muttered, “Well, fuck me sideways and call me Sally…”

  “What do people call you?” Mildred asked.

  “I answer to Tom, among other things,” he replied.

  Then the man turned to Ryan, who was drying his feet prior to putting on his boots. “Before we head out, I’ve got to ask you something else,” he said. “No matter what you tell me, it won’t change anything that we’ve agreed on. After all, a deal’s a deal. I just want to know. Did you chill those bikers to get the booty?”

  Before Ryan could reply, J.B. chimed in.

  “We ain’t coldheart robbers,” the Armorer hissed through clenched teeth.

  “And I’m supposed to know that from looking at you?” Tom countered, amused at the idea.

  “The bikers were already chilled when we found them,” Mildred explained. “Stickies swarmed them.”

  Tom frowned and shook his head. “Son of a bitch, that’s a triple nasty way to go.”

  “We need to get a move on,” Ryan said. “Some of BoomT’s sec men could have survived the explosion. When they look around they’re not going to be real happy with the way things turned out.”

  “My ship’s moored over that away,” Tom said, pointing due south, toward what a century ago had been the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, and what now was a narrow slip of a makeshift harbor.

  There were five extra twenty-five-pound packs to lug. J.B. couldn’t carry anything but his M-4000, and he had stiffened up so much he needed Mildred’s help just to get to his feet. When she reached for her load of C-4, their new business partner brushed away her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll take it,” Tom said. “You see to your friend there.”

  The pack of plastique felt cool against Ryan’s back as its moisture soaked through his coat and shirt. They climbed out of the water hazard’s bowl and set off down the slope, onto the flatland, past the cultivated fields. Ryan took the rear guard, behind Mildred and J.B.

  There was no longer any need to run. They walked at a brisk steady pace. Ryan kept looking over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t being followed.

  The sound of the explosion had awakened the field hands from their midday snoozes. Ryan saw them standing outside their shanties, one hundred or more yards away, hands on hips or shielding their eyes from the sun, looking in the direction of the mall and the rising pillar of smoke.

  Beyond the south end of the golf course, the companions stepped back onto the gridwork of ruined and deserted city streets.

  Almost at once, a group of armed men appeared around a corner, running toward them from the direction of the Gulf.

  “Easy now,” Ryan cautioned the others as hands moved for weapons. “They don’t know what’s happened. And we’re not going to tell them. Keep walking nice and slow, like we’re in no particular hurry.”

  That wasn’t the case for the strangers. Ryan measured the opposition as they rapidly closed ground. A half dozen sec men carried Soviet-made assault rifles on shoulder slings and five crusty sailors had the butts of their sidearms hooked over their waistbands. There was shock on all their faces. They didn’t go for their blasters. They didn’t see the companions as a threat.

  A sec man stepped up and addressed Tom, whom he obviously knew. “What the fuck?” the deeply tanned, bald-headed guy exclaimed, pointing behind them at the massive smoke cloud. The wrinkles in his forehead extended past the middle of his scalp.

  “Damned if I know,” Harmonica Man replied. “We’d just left the emporium, heading for my ship when there was a giant explosion at our backs. Fuck-awful blast. Never seen the like. Don’t know what the hell BoomT had squirreled away, but I’m telling you it all went up in a single go. We were three-quarters of a mile away and it still nearly chilled us.”

  “What about other survivors?” the sec man asked, dread creeping into his voice. “Wounded?”

  “We didn’t see anybody,” Tom said. “Fires were burning red-hot and there was too much smoke. Don’t see how anyone could have lived through it, though.”

  “We’ve got to find out for sure,” the sec man said. “Some of our crew might have made it. They might be hurt. Come back with us and help recce.”

  “There’s no point,” Tom said, shaking his head. “There’s nothing up there but ashes. It’ll take three days for them to cool down enough so you can start sifting through them. I’m not sticking around for that. I’m leaving Port A ville on this tide, and you’ve seen the last of me.”

  “Well, fuck you, then,” the bald sec man said, angrily waving his crew onward.

  “I wish you luck,” Harmonica Man said to his back.

  The companions watched the would-be rescuers hurry off. The sec men and sailors didn’t cut through golf course, but took the street route, which was faster.

  “Well, that makes things a whole lot easier,” Tom said when they were out of earshot. “Those were BoomT’s harbor guards. They could have made things dicey. Now there’s nothing to stop us from sailing off into the sunset.”

  Standing water started at the railroad tracks, which divided Port A ville roughly in two, lengthwise. They sloshed through ankle-deep black brine; there was no way around it. The rise in sea level had inundated Big Hill Reservoir and the associated holding ponds. Sabine Lake had become a new invagination of the Gulf of Mexico. At closer range, the oil refinery was even more of a decrepit shambles, cracking towers canted at odd angles, gangways ending in space, and it was surrounded by an iridescent marsh of spilled oil. The reek of sulfur was like a snapkick in the solar plexus. Ahead of them, beyond the swamped and decaying downtown, Ryan could see huge, engine-powered ships—rusting hulks of tugs and tankers—listing on their sides in the shallows. Violent storms had driven them up onto the city streets and left them wedged there.

  “Best you all follow me from here on,” Tom said. “I know the route the mule carts take.” He led them through knee-high water to the concrete ramp where the carts were off-loaded and loaded. The top of the ramp was connected to a system of crude floating docks. Big blocks of oil-stained, closed cell plastic foam and sealed, empty fifty-five-gallon drums supporting scrap lumber planks lay side by side. The pathway floated alongside the drowned buildings, past the ruined ships, and then cut a straight line across the deep predark channel to the sailboats tied up at the bases of the cargo cranes.

  The dock moved under their weight, bobbing, undulating like the body of a giant mutie snake. At the tail end of the line, the motion was the most extreme. Ryan had to concentrate on every step and anticipate the rolling rise and fall.

  As they negotiated the final, unprotected stretch of the walkway, a bullet whined past Ryan’s head and slapped into the water in front of him on the right. The wake of the near-miss longblaster round brushed the side of his neck and a chill ran down his spine to the soles of his feet.

  Seconds later came the bark of a rifle shot.

  Chapter Nine

  W
hen BoomT pushed the little red firing switch, he was expecting a loud and satisfying result.

  He wasn’t expecting cataclysm.

  He wasn’t expecting to black out from the explosion’s pressure wave.

  The entrepreneur came to after a split second of oblivion, his head reeling. He couldn’t tell there had been two explosions—they had come too close together and his ears had been instantly overloaded. Now it felt like wads of cotton had been rammed into them. Or like he was thirty feet under water. Momentarily the world was as silent as the grave.

  Then his senses began to return, one by one.

  He tasted blood on his lips; it was leaking out of his nostrils in a steady trickle. Because he had taken cover behind the overturned semitrailer, he couldn’t immediately see what had happened to his world. Even so, he realized that the blast was exponentially bigger than he had planned. It had not only ripped the steel sheathing from the top side of the trailer, leaving bare the skeleton of the frame, it had lifted and scooted the massive rig six feet across the sidewalk, which in turn pushed the golf cart with him on it.

  The sec men hunkered around him looked stunned, too. They were bleeding from their noses and ears.

  Though his mind was clearing, he couldn’t seem to make his limbs obey him. Before he could get the cart in gear a choking pall of dust and smoke swept over the trailer. There was a lot more of both than he had anticipated.

  Only when still-joined sections of his emporium’s concrete-filled exterior wall began to rain down around them through the haze, screaming to earth like unexploded 250 pound bombs, did BoomT realize the extent to which something had gone wrong.

  Those bombs crashed onto the ancient pavement, shattering it and themselves in sprays of shrapnel and showers of sparks. The impacts actually shook the ground.

  Whether seeing an opportunity in the confusion and smoke to escape their bondage, or simply fleeing in panic, his four slaves chose that moment to put wings on their heels. They sprinted away from the semi-trailer and the parking lot, arms covering their heads as hunks of building continued to fall.