Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  “Perhaps, dear friends,” Doc said, “we should rethink our plan of action. Perhaps our going ashore this afternoon isn’t such a good idea, after all. Perhaps a better course would be for us to move on while we can. Surely the East Coast barons will pay well enough for the explosive—”

  “We’re already here,” Tom said.

  “He’s right,” Ryan said. “We’ve come a long way in the wrong direction to sell the plastique to the East Coast barons. Least we can do is check it out. If it doesn’t look right, we’ll make tracks in a hurry.”

  “Leave the C-4 belowdecks for now,” the skipper told them. “It’ll just slow down the recce. We can come back for it if everything’s okay.”

  Ryan and Doc helped the captain swing and lower a gantried twelve-foot raft over the side.

  “Mebbe you’d better stay behind,” Tom said to J.B. “You’re gonna have a hell of a time getting in and out of the dinghy.”

  “I’m fine,” J.B. said through clenched teeth.

  “You might be able to carry that scattergun,” the captain went on, “but shooting it is going to cause you a world of hurt. No reason for you to take the chance of injuring yourself more.”

  “I’ll be just fine.”

  Ryan and Tom helped the others down into the boat, then they climbed in themselves. Seven people made the dinghy mighty cramped, but the distance to the island was short, no more than seventy-five yards.

  When everybody was seated and as comfortable as they were going to get, Tom put out the oars and, leaning his back into it, began rowing them to shore. Ryan sat on the bow, his longblaster at the ready, scope lens uncapped. Just in case.

  As the inflatable raft skidded up onto the beach a smell enveloped them. Rank. Fecund. Eye-watering.

  Unmistakable.

  “That ain’t home cookin’,” J.B. said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Daniel Desipio shielded his eyes from the sun with the flat of his hand, searching the horizon to the southwest for a sign of the oncoming Matachìn miniarmada. The pirate ships first appeared as a row of dark dots in the seam between sea and sky, then vanished one by one as they slipped into the trough of the offshore swell, reappearing again as they climbed the crest. Disappearing. Reappearing.

  As the vessels crept closer and closer to the island, with his naked eye Daniel could distinguish three low, squat shapes, which he knew were oceangoing tugs. No plumes of dark brown smoke pumped up from their stacks. To save precious fuel, the tugs were under “people power” until they closed on the target. There were plenty of able-bodied rowers to choose from, former residents of Browns and Matamoros villes conscripted into service at blaster and blade point. The Matachìn had all the time in the world to reach their destination. Their quarry wasn’t going anywhere, and for damned sure reinforcements weren’t on the way.

  Sweeping in front of the trio of tugs, four sailing ships beat back and forth to make headway against the breeze. They were the fleet’s pursuit and interdiction craft.

  Though the hour of slaughter grew near, the Texas sky showed no hint of turning black; nor the Gulf of turning red as blood. The Vikings and Martians of Daniel’s fireside tale were artifacts of Slaughter Realms, figments of an anonymous cumulative imagination; they were not the pirates’ closest allies. The Matachìn relied on their own mythic savagery—and mortar barrage—to put the fear of death into intended victims. The predark tugs carried more than enough ordnance to dismantle Padre’s stationary defenses. They carried enough HE to flatten the place, end to end. And the master of the fleet was no stranger to excess.

  Under the command of machete-wielding Commander Guillermo Casacampo the venerable nautical catch phrase “All hands on deck!” took on a grisly literal meaning. Post-conquest, the hands of the defeated lay severed and scattered along the scuppers of his flagship while their former owners bobbed like corks in the armada’s wake, waving bloody stumps.

  When the ships came within ten miles of the island they started to spread out to their assigned attack positions. Although there were no sounds of alarm from the Yoko Maru, the surviving islanders had to be able to see what was coming; they had to be getting nervous. Daniel was starting to get nervous, too. This part of the operation always gave him butterflies. He had seen things go sour before.

  Matachìn cannon crews in a chill frenzy tended to lose focus and get swept up in the moment. The really big worry, however, was Casacampo, himself. His ships could only carry and feed so many slaves, and stow only so much booty. They already had gathered more than enough of both from the previous two sackings. Under the circumstances the commander was free to take even wider liberties with human lives.

  Including Daniel’s.

  After all, he wasn’t the only plague vector at their disposal.

  Disposal being the operative word.

  He hurried away from the shore. It was time to relocate to a nice, safe place.

  The job of disease vector was no cakewalk. Accidents happened in the heat of battle; shrapnel was indiscriminate, as was automatic weapon fire. Sometimes dengue carriers infiltrating a new ville were murdered just because they were strangers, or for some other reason unrelated to the threat they posed. Not all of them were Fire Talkers. Some were whores, some were traders, some were mercies. Or combinations of same. The key was sociability. Making new friends.

  Daniel climbed to the top of the dunes and jogged along the ridge to make better time. He had already scoped out the best spot, in the center of the island as far as possible from the machine-gun emplacements, the ville and the grounded freighter—the main targets of the Matachìn gunners. While the folks abandoned in the ville struggled in their death throes, he had dug himself a deep, narrow foxhole in the sand.

  At times like these the freezie saw himself as Faust, selling his soul not once, but to a succession of ever more fiendish devils. The first mortgage was given to the publisher of Slaughter Realms in return for the warm glow of seeing his very own words in print. To escape the bottomless sink hole of wage slave-hood that was series publishing, he had thrown himself at the mercy of scientists by answering an ad in the back of an alternative throwaway newspaper for “medical research subjects, some foreign travel required, top pay and stock options.”

  The initial interview and physical exam had gone well; he had been offered the job of human lab rat, which paid close to ten times his current annual salary. The details of the research program were skimmed over with platitudes about “saving humanity,” “ending suffering” and promises of “virtually no personal risk.” All Daniel could see were the dollar signs and the opportunity to uncover something exciting to write about, something worthy of his talent and devotion, something that would bring him the acclaim and reward he deserved. It seemed like a win-win.

  The moment he arrived at the remote Panamanian research site, a former maximum security prison in the heart of an immense rain-forested island, he realized he’d made a frying-pan-into-the-fire mistake. As it turned out, the ultrasecret Project Persephone was black box military. Not only was it underfunded and undersupervised, the grave dangers to participants had been purposefully concealed. Once boots were on the ground, there was no way to back out of the deal, either.

  In the first six months of captivity, close to ninety percent of his fellow volunteer test subjects had died from the biological weapon experiments. That Daniel had survived the agonies of infection was a double-edged sword. The experience had turned him into a carrier of weaponized, hemorrhagic dengue flavivirus. He was a walking disease factory. He couldn’t return to civilization without spreading the bioengineered plague. He was stuck in the stinking, sweltering jungle.

  So much for spending all the money he’d been promised.

  So much for dreams of using the experience to become a bestselling writer.

  Eventually, the Project Persephone scientists had convinced him that his only hope was cryogenesis, that some point in the future a cure would be found and he’d be free to rejoin humanity
.

  A little more than a century later, thawed out in a time that still offered no cure, he had signed the third Faustian pact, this one with the worst of the lot, the Lords of Death, also known as the Xibalban.

  The other options on the table were death by torture and suicide.

  Atapul X, the highest ranking of the Lords of Death, made Commander Casacampo look like Mother Teresa. He was living proof that evil, along with eye and hair color, resided in the genes.

  Daniel remembered Atapul X’s distant ancestor most vividly. When he had first arrived at the decaying compound’s helipad, Atapul Suarez-Denizac had been one of the prisoners held over from the Noriega days, still incarcerated because he was too dangerous to transport. The last surviving inmates of Panama’s Devil’s Island were glue- and gasoline-sniffing, brain-damaged mass murderers and rapists. They had been sold as a job lot to the Project Persephone scientists, part of the shabby furnishings of the moldy concrete prison, to do with whatever they pleased.

  While Daniel was enduring the scientists’ experimentation, Suarez-Denizac, a homicidal maniac with delusions of grandeur, had led a violent prisoner escape into the bush. Living in dense forest among the crocodiles, Bushmasters, vampire bats and packs of feral dogs, the escapees had turned cannibal, waylaying and devouring the military police who tried to track them down. By the time the ringleader was recaptured by prison authorities Daniel was already in cryostasis, locked away in the bowels of the main structure. As the legend went, Suarez-Denizac had renamed himself Atapul the First after Armageddon and the fall of the whitecoat compound.

  By an unhappy and tragic twist of fate, the psychotic delusions of Suarez-Denizac turned out to be pretty much on the money, as five generations of subsequent history would attest.

  Daniel was about to jump down into the hidey-hole he’d prepared when out of the corner of his eye he caught a blur of movement. He turned and through the long strands of dune grass, saw the top of a three-masted ship, sails furled, as it glided to a stop in the otherwise deserted anchorage.

  A seagoing trader arriving late to the party. And the skipper and crew couldn’t see what was bearing down on the other side of the island.

  The unlucky fucks, he acknowledged, were about to get the surprise of their lives.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The companions fanned out on the empty beach with weapons drawn. Nothing moved along the shore; nothing moved upslope, from the direction of the huts, either. Mildred and the others advanced on Ryan’s signal toward a long, low berm of recently turned sand about seventy-five feet above the waterline. The odor of death was coming from that direction, as was the droning of flies.

  Neither boded well.

  Four shovels lay discarded on the berm.

  Covering her nose and mouth with a hand, Mildred looked over the verge of the excavated pit. The open grave was five feet deep and about eight feet across. It held corpses of all ages: men, women, children, babies, piled on top of each other in a tangle. All with bloodied faces and clothes. Some of the dead were horribly bloated.

  Mildred saw scurrying movement in the pit: black shadows, long-tailed blurs scattering, darting among the bodies.

  Rats.

  Krysty groaned through her cupped hand. “There’s got to be more than thirty people in there,” she said. The prehensile tendrils of her red mutie hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm.

  “Massacred.” J.B. spit.

  Mildred watched the captain’s face as he took in the victims. The youthful light went out of his eyes for a second. It just winked out. He looked suddenly as old as the creases in his face.

  “What the hell happened?” he exclaimed.

  “It doesn’t appear they were gunshot,” Mildred told him.

  “Then what killed them?” Tom said.

  There was no way of telling without taking a closer look.

  Mildred quickly tied a kerchief over her nose and mouth and then leaned over the edge of the mass grave. She could see petechia on exposed skin everywhere. The red spots stood out against fish-white bellies and backs, every place the sun hadn’t browned in life. Although Mildred was a medical doctor she wasn’t a diagnostician; she had been a researcher in a specific field—biochemistry related to resuscitation problems in cryogenesis. Med school and residency were more than a century in her past. She wasn’t exactly sure what the markings signified, or whether they were connected to the cause of death. Petechia and high fever often went hand in hand.

  “Could be any number of things,” Mildred said, pulling back. “Some kind of influenza. Bird flu. It could also be a mass poisoning. Red tide. Cigatura. Paralytic shellfish poisoning. Or a predark chemical that somehow ended up in their water or food supply. There’s no way to tell for sure without drawing blood and tissues samples from the deceased and putting them through a toxicology lab. And we all know that isn’t gonna happen.”

  “How long have they been dead?” Ryan asked her.

  “In this heat? Your guess is as good as mine. Ten hours. Five hours.”

  “Why did the grave diggers not complete the interment?” Doc said, glancing over at the dropped shovels. “Why did they not cover the bodies?”

  “Mebbe they took sick, too,” J.B. suggested.

  “Could they all be chilled?” Krysty said, looking up at the rows of shanties. “Could the whole ville be wiped out?”

  “Perhaps we should take this for a sign,” Doc said. “A Biblical visitation of plague is by definition random and puts wayfarers such as ourselves at grave risk. I hasten to remind everyone that the ship awaits…”

  Then the sound of moaning wafted down to them from the ville, high-pitched, desperate.

  “Not all croaked,” Jak said.

  Nobody made a move.

  “There were a couple hundred people living here,” Tom told the companions. “I did a lot of business with them. I liked them. Some were my friends. If anyone’s still alive on the island and can be saved, we need to find out. And get them out of here. Mebbe they can tell us what happened.”

  None of the companions said anything in response.

  The moaning continued. Whomever it was, he or she was in terrible agony.

  “You can wait here,” the skipper told them, “or go back to the Tempest if you want, but I’m going ahead.”

  “I’ll come along,” Mildred said.

  “We’ll all come along,” Ryan told him.

  With Tom on point and weapons up, they moved cautiously toward the first of the shacks. When they looked up the narrow lane that led deeper into the ville, they could see bodies on the ground, left where they fell.

  “Biblical,” Doc muttered.

  Mildred and Tom followed the moans to a one-room shack on the right with delaminating plywood walls and a sheet-metal roof. Beside the doorless doorway, in the shade of the rusting eaves was a black-enameled, knock-off Weber kettle and a pair of white plastic lawn chairs.

  Mildred entered first with her ZKR 551 blaster in a two-handed grip. The skipper backed her up with his .45-caliber Smith. There were no windows in the hut. The only light and air came from the doorway and the cracks in the wall seams. The heat and the stench—the coppery smell of blood mixed with fleshy decay and expelled bodily fluids—in the enclosed space was paralyzing. The sauna from hell. The concentrated stink burned Mildred’s eyes and the lining of her nose and throat.

  The moaner was a woman in her late twenties in a gauzy, badly stained, Hawaiian print dress. She lay on her back on a pallet on the floor. Her dirty blond hair was matted to her skull with sweat and oil.

  Mildred knelt beside her, taking in the deathly pale cheeks and chin crusted with dried gore and vomit. She was bleeding from her nose and blood oozed from the corners of her mouth. Every time she exhaled, a rattling sound came from deep in her chest. Her eyes were wide open, but she didn’t seem to be aware of Mildred’s presence.

  Tom leaned over Mildred’s shoulder, his blaster lowered to his side. “Oh shit,” he said.
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  “Stay back,” she warned him, beads of perspiration rolling down her face.

  Glancing around the hut, Mildred counted four supine bodies on the floor. One adult and three children. Only the young woman was still alive; from the distention of their bellies and the ghastly swelling of their limbs, the others were long gone. Was the woman the children’s mother? Had she looked on helplessly as all her babies died? Mildred’s brain automatically made those tragic connections, although there was no way to tell if they were accurate.

  “I can’t examine her in here,” Mildred said. “It’s too dark and the smell’s too awful.”

  “Is it safe to move her?” Ryan said from the outside the hut’s doorway.

  “Safe for her, or safe for us?” Mildred asked.

  “Both,” Ryan said.

  “I doubt it’s going to matter as far as she’s concerned,” Mildred told him. “It’s safe for us if we don’t get her blood or other fluids on bare, broken skin. Be very careful picking her up.”

  Using her clothing, the hem of her skirt and the back of her dress collar, Ryan and Tom hoisted the sick woman up like a sack of grain and lugged her limp form toward the doorway. As they stepped into the wedge of hot sunlight, she jolted awake, then went berserk in their grasp, kicking and thrashing, fighting to get away. Maintaining control with difficulty, Ryan and Tom rushed her into the lane; as they did, blood trailed out from under her skirt in a thick, crimson ribbon. They set her down on the hard-packed sand and stepped well back.

  She lay there, eyes open, hands trembling, breathing shallow and fast. The brief, violent struggle seemed to have taken everything out of her.

  Doc took in the pale, tortured face, the smeared gore and vomit, and murmured, “Dear sweet Lord.”

  Holstering her weapon, Mildred knelt again. She backhanded the sweat from her brow to keep it from stinging into her eyes. She noted the petechia on the woman’s exposed upper chest and throat, and the facial pallor and cyanosis—blueness—around the mouth. She gently touched the woman’s extremities and found them cool and clammy. With difficulty, she found a pulse at the wrist. It was rapid and thready.