100 A.Z. (Book 2): Tenochtitlan

by Nelson, Patrick T.

  She also instituted a volunteer program, where families could trade their sick or elderly –

  perfect for gelding – for protection for the rest of the family. Sara had no intention of honoring these immunity deals in the final stages of her plan, but they was adequate to prevent open rebellion in the short term.

  The skyscrapers were soon filling with freshly turned undead. She sent teams of handlers to try and bring back walkers from the herd.

  They did find many soldiers who had fled during the pandemonium. These numbered around 2500. Some had stayed in groups to protect themselves from the herd, others had made it alone. Most of them were circumspect with their accounts of their absence. They probably feared penalization. All returning soldiers were immediately reinstated without reprimand into the main force, though. Sara assured them no punishment was in order, as the circumstances were out of their control.

  All seemed to be progressing swimmingly.

  One group was not submissive, though. They were unable to find solace in the hope of escaping the “lottery” system for being turned. They were also unable to stand by and watch as others were turned. These individuals were the Brothers of Tlaxcala.

  ***

  Reports from Tenochtitlan began to stream into the uplands. They were clear—war was heading their way. The thousands who lived in the mountains, reinforced with the moral courage and righteous anger of Quintana, prepared zealously. The once-defensive community pivoted, preparing to take a shadow battle to the new queen.

  They planned to do this by supporting a rebellion inside the city. Brothers already inside Tenochtitlan would be supplied with everything they needed to foment and maintain an insurgency—intelligence, covert operatives, weapons, even food. Quintana passed on all his knowledge of the city and its vulnerabilities. This wouldn’t be an invasion. It would be a series of hit and run attacks to show the citizens someone was resisting. To encourage them to do the same.

  “Most of them won’t resist! They are in step with the queen! Even if they aren’t helping her, they’re sitting tight, simply hope their number won’t get called!” a younger man on the leadership council shouted in Spanish at a meeting.

  “It’s true, but we cannot expect everyone to fight,” an elder replied.

  “Isn’t our whole plan resting on the hope that all will begin to fight?! We do not have the numbers or the tools to lay siege to the city.”

  “There are other ways to win. Remember the Battle of 56 A.Z. There was no outright fighting and yet there were victories,” a different elder replied.

  “And that battle accomplished nothing! The city remained in the hands of the king,” another said.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” Quintana interrupted. All faces turned to look at the Wolf of Tenochtitlan. Their expressions ranged wildly. Some were hopeful or attentive, but most looked anxious, irritated or suspicious. Quintana knew his presence here made many of the Brothers nervous, no matter why he said he’d come or how many fighters he’d brought with him. He understood the attitudes, felt their fears. He had spent years trying to foment them. Now he had to undo them in a matter of days.

  “You are all saying exactly what the queen would want. ‘The people are weak,’ and ‘We cannot hope to win in outright conflict.’ This is all in her favor. You have much more in your favor than you realize. The Brothers are strong in number within the city. At my previous estimates, somewhere between seven and nineteen hundred. From what you’ve told me, many don’t even know of each other. They don’t have the luxury of being open about their membership.” He paused. “Once you begin harassing and sabotaging, you will find allies inside you didn’t know you had. We may not be able to kill every invader within the city, but we will make the queen’s task so cost-prohibitive as to give her no choice but to leave.”

  The Brothers looked at one another. Did they trust him or not? Eventually, they all acquiesced. If the Wolf of Tenochtitlan had considered the Brothers a threat, then they must indeed be powerful within the city.

  “You must understand, though, she will come for us here,” Quintana warned. “It won’t be long before she learns of this safe haven and will seek to take it from you.”

  “Let her come,” said Cesar, the head elder.

  Patrols in the hills and the valley were increased. Twenty teams of five people were sent to Tenochtitlan disguised as avocado traders. They took with them no weapons, only produce, and Quintana’s assessment of where they should attack first—the boat yard and the rope production works.

  The city filled with acrid smoke as the boat yard and the rope production works burned. The saboteurs were unknown. Dalbec nearly panicked at their loss. Sara ignored his ranting explanations of the second and third order effects of such losses. Bottom line, it meant a slowing in the production of zombies. Sara was only mildly concerned, even when Dalbec provided an estimate on how much longer the benchmark of fifteen thousand walking dead would take to reach.

  “We’ve lost two-thirds of the lumber there! All the rope is burned! This will push it back by at least three months!” he cried.

  “I don’t understand the delay. How much really burned?” she asked.

  “But it isn’t so much the loss of materials as it is the workers! They’re afraid now! We will have to increase security. People won’t want to transport goods to the production zones. There are cascading effects to all this!”

  To Dalbec, Sara clearly didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. Perhaps she just didn’t fully understand the consequences. More likely, though, she had trouble taking anything he said seriously, he thought bitterly. Unless it was one of his brilliant ideas. Those were worth hearing. When he started “whining” Sara simply wanted him to go away.

  Dalbec switched tactics. He cornered General Page the next day and implored him to talk to her. Page understood the unusual dynamic between Dalbec and Sara. He agreed to impress upon her the severity of the situation. Dalbec was right. Something had to be done.

  “What should be done?” she asked impatiently when Page addressed her. It was obvious her mind had been elsewhere lately. Beach daydreams? Or perhaps a guilty conscience?

  “Recruit informants, create registries of all incoming migrants and traders, increase security and patrols, institute random inspections…I can keep going, but you get the idea,” Page said.

  “Fine. Do it,” she said.

  ***

  Teams of Brothers, the supposed avocado farmers, located in the south of the city had been the ones who’d burned the rope and boat production facilities. Two of those cells had already been caught and turned, informed on by a witness in one case, neighbors with sharp ears in the other. You’d think a common desire to stay human would make people hang together, but snitches were everywhere. The queen had promised informants protection for their entire families for any quality information pertaining to the sabotage and its perpetrators. Paranoia increased. False accusations were thrown around freely—sometimes with good intentions. Mostly with poor intentions, though. Informing had become a way to settle personal vendettas or steal wives.

  Jose was on one of the teams sent from the mountains into Tenochtitlan to conduct sabotage operations. He was short and paunchy with a mustache. He had a nervous chuckle that betrayed his anxiety over being found. He was with four young women pretending to be his daughters. He didn’t like this disguise. Some of the young women didn’t look much like him at all.

  “They are adopted,” he said to an inquisitive vendor when they stopped to buy some food.

  They were squatting in a burned out building near the edge of town. For three days, they watched shipments of new walkers leave a large building two blocks away, headed outside the city to the flooded skyscrapers for storage. The official story, crafted by Dalbec, was that these were criminals who’d been turned, but that was obviously a lie to anyone who chose to think about it.

  Jose and his team noted that the numbers passing by increased every day. The first day it had been
ninety-five, then 108, and then 122.

  That morning Jose’s team would strike, he vomited. Urban warfare wasn’t his thing. He much preferred the mountains. The mission was in the city, though, so here he was.

  Jose was the thrower. The young ladies were lookouts. He was in the second story of a building that overlooked the road. He thought his heart might explode in his chest when he saw the column of walkers approach. The rope holding them together looked vulnerable. Just right for the planned attack. There were more walkers than the previous day. He didn’t count, but could just tell. As the walker column passed, the young ladies pretended to dump wastewater onto the walkers. This wasn’t an uncommon practice. When they were halfway past Jose, he lit a Molotov cocktail and threw it at the walkers passing by. What had looked like wastewater had actually been highly flammable distilled alcohol smuggled in by the Brothers. The Molotov cocktail hit the ground near the middle of the column and shattered with a flash. It ignited the fuel on the walkers, and soon flames engulfed them.

  The handlers looked on in horror with no means of putting out the fire. As planned, the ropes holding the approximately 150 walkers caught fire as well. Soon the bonds burned through, and flaming zombies lurched their way into the surrounding area. The neighborhood bell rang, sounding an emergency. Jose’s heart was on fire, too, seeing the oppressors now vulnerable. Instead of leaving the area, he dropped down to the street. The enemy held out their hands, pleading. Jose and his team knifed the handlers, leaving them in pools of blood. The chaos didn’t keep people in the streets from seeing Jose’s face as he stabbed the servants of the queen.

  Jose cringed. He might be identified later by one of these very people.

  The team ran off to the sound of the bell still clanging in the background.

  ***

  The strange daze that had come over Sara in the previous days lifted as soon as she got word of the fire. It had destroyed some hard-to-acquire harnesses and showed the populace she wasn’t in total control. She slammed her fist on the table in the temple, knocking off the ugly incense holder. Dalbec hastily left before she could say anything cruel. He wanted to ask why this was any different than the attacks he tried to get her to notice earlier.

  “Page, get these rebels and bring them to me,” she seethed. “I want to question them personally.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he nodded, and left her to stew over this latest insult.

  Another team of the Brothers from the mountains kidnapped six handlers who were drinking and bragging in a bar. The next day the bodies of the handlers were found hanging from some old light poles near the city center with notes threatening the same for all colluders with the new queen. Sara increased the rewards associated with information in connection to the insurgents. Someone had to have seen them hanging up the bodies. They had to be caught. Some in the populace of Tenochtitlan were inspired by the act, and inspiration was bad for her plan. She needed them hopeless.

  Jose’s team was caught and brought to Sara. They endured days of torture. All she learned was they had come from the mountains. From a place without a name. Another week of torture broke Jose and he pointed to an uninhabited area on the map with no roads or names. He had to be lying, Sara thought.

  She sent a squad of men to the location on the map, despite her doubts. They never returned. She sent a larger force. They did not return, either. Had they deserted or were they killed? She summoned General Page and told him to prepare to send a substantial force to the mountains. He carefully asked how many men, as the army was already stretched thin between security duty and trying to locate spies and saboteurs. The people of Tenochtitlan grew restless, and he feared there soon would be riots. His reserve forces already were occupied with the turning operations. He would have to take men from there to suppress any rebellion—if he even could suppress it.

  “Send a thousand men to this ‘location on the map.’ That should squash these insurgents,” Sara said.

  General Page did as he was told. He was beginning to feel the downside of being her general. She gave the orders, and he executed them whether they were good or not. And if her mood turned, he could face death. Bowen seemed a less contemptible figure every day.

  Chapter 29

  The Brothers in the mountains worked feverishly to prepare for the attack they knew would come. All the people worked together despite disagreements about the strategy for ultimately defeating this new queen. They knew how to defend their territory, as evident by their killing of the men Sara had sent, but none of them knew how to mount an all-out invasion of a city.

  John helped with the logging operations to provide lumber for the defenses. The rest of the Martyrs joined builders who made tree stands and defensive walls, spiked holes in the ground, and reinforced underground tunnels and bunkers. The people of these mountains had been living here for generations and knew every valley, stream, trail and thicket. This knowledge allowed them to hide trailheads and junctions to prevent their use by the enemy. They knew where the topography would naturally lead the unfamiliar, and set up traps and ambushes in those locations. Then suddenly the report they’d been waiting for arrived. A force of a thousand men from Tenochtitlan had left the city and was heading west, presumably to their location.

  The reports of successful attacks on the queen’s infrastructure had encouraged the mountain villages, but soldiers heading west meant some of the operatives sent to the city must have been captured. If so, they had likely been tortured and maybe turned. It sickened John, knowing they’d sent those people to such a fate. Cesar comforted and assured everyone that it had been necessary, that the insurgents knew what they’d signed up for. It was not the Brothers’ fault that their friends had met tragic ends. It was the queen’s.

  Scouts reported that the attackers were two days’ march from their location. Most of the young men in the mountains had never seen the destruction of war. Some were defiant and proud, eager for battle. Others were afraid. For John, the memories of the gruesome battles with the Western Army were still fresh. He was afraid, although he wasn’t about to back down. These savages from the north had destroyed his family. He wasn’t going to let them do it to anyone else.

  “You cannot win if the enemy is yourself,” Cesar said to John.

  “What?” John asked.

  “No matter how many of the enemy you kill, you will still have to live with yourself. Make sure you are fighting for the right reason.”

  “I am.”

  “Hmm,” Cesar grunted.

  “This queen has to be stopped.”

  That night, the cool mountain air was heavy with dread. Despite the preparations and skillful defenses, the people knew they had awakened the sleeping lion, and it was coming. Many had secretly hoped they could continue unnoticed in their efforts against the queen. The fact she had found them so quickly didn’t bode well. Maybe this queen did have supernatural powers. Would she be able to redirect the giant herd up into the mountains and right on top of them? These thoughts kept people awake that night.

  John couldn’t rest, kept awake by thoughts of his son Aaron. Was he all right? Was he even alive? Pangs of guilt surged through John. Why hadn’t he gone home after escaping Tenochtitlan? “We have to stop this queen or no one will be safe anywhere,” he told himself. He only half believed that motivation for having stayed. Cesar’s words about fighting for the right reason bounced around in his head. He tried to think about it but his mind was exhausted from the day’s work. What was he really after?

  There was a whistle – the jungle version of a doorbell – at the door of his hut. It was the rest of the Martyrs. Silently, Lee took him by the hand and motioned for him to follow. They hiked out onto The Horseback, a portion of ridgeline that was clear of trees, gently rounded and bowed like the back of a horse. It was a full moon and they walked surely and quietly. No one said a word, not even Tock.

  A small herd of deer feeding on acorns absentmindedly watched them pass. They didn’t look at each other, as they con
tinued past them and toward a large grove of trees on the eastern slope. The deer spooked and bounded off. The Martyrs sat down, still silent, among the trees for about an hour, looking out over the dark valley. Nothing broke the quiet except for the occasional breeze through the trees above. They all knew it wouldn’t be silent in a day or so.

  One by one, they stood up to make the walk back to the village alone.

  ***

  Reports trickled in. At first they were nothing new—a large force approached along the eastern road.

  Then the reports increased in specificity. The force had split into two. One was taking the northern road and the other the southern. The queen’s forces would attack from two directions.

  John, Cecil and Jamed were sent south. Tock, Carla and Lee would help defend the north. Quintana and his men were only trusted to act as an auxiliary force. An auxiliary force kept under close watch.

  The Martyrs knew their weren’t going to save the people in these mountains—they were plenty capable of doing it themselves. Their contribution, as Cesar had reiterated to them that morning, was morale. The Martyrs would surely only join themselves to a just and righteous cause, which bolstered the Brothers’ confidence and determination to meet the evil from the north. This brought on protests from the six that they were not worthy of such admiration. Cesar countered that their humility only made the feeling stronger among the people.

  “Humility, with the exception of Tock, I mean,” Cesar had joked.

  Cesar didn’t mention the significant minority that resented the foreign Martyrs’ elevated status. They were outsiders, non-Mexicans, and not worthy of the admiration.

  Such concerns were far away now. Reports came in that the queen’s men were making their way up. They would find the foothills easy to overcome. There were only skirmishers and a handful of traps and fortifications at that elevation. That was the plan.