by James Axler
There were more of the giant, eye-patch faces spaced here and there among the seething throng.
“What the fuck?” Ryan said.
Chapter Two
Harmonica Tom stood at the helm of Tempest, feathering the engine’s throttle to maintain a constant safe distance from the row of ship lights in front of him. He ran the forty-foot vessel blacked-out, as he had done every night for the last three weeks, every night since he’d escaped from Padre Island. Finding the pirate convoy after dark was a piece of cake for the seasoned skipper. The six target boats were always lit up, mast, bow and stern; this to help keep them from crashing into one another.
During the day, Tom had to lay back in his pursuit for fear a crow’s-nest lookout would glimpse his mast tops astern. The last thing he wanted was for part of the fleet to peel off and double back to check out who was following its wake. The seagoing trader was sure they’d have no trouble recognizing Tempest: he’d already used it to kick their asses once. Unfortunately, he’d only managed to sink a single ship, while damaging two others. The fallback in pursuit meant he had to do some zigging and zagging to find the convoy again after sundown.
No problem this night, though.
The Matachìn ships were under engine power; even the slave galley tugs were burning diesel. And they were heading in toward the coast, making for the corona of shimmering lights low on the horizon.
By Tom’s map reckoning, it had to be Veracruz.
It was starting to look like the fire talkers’ stories were all true. That there really was a wider and more prosperous world than Deathlands, existing invisibly, simultaneously, from nukeday forward.
When he had first heard the tales of civilization’s survival in the south, Tom had wanted to get in on the ground floor, to be the first to establish peaceful commerce, to forge trade links with the more advanced culture, and thereby get his hands on some of its fabled material wealth. But after seeing what the dreadlocked emissaries of that culture had done to Padre Island, the entrepreneurship fantasies vanished. Payback had become his single-minded goal.
And payback was his forte.
Like other Deathlands traders, Harmonica Tom Wolf had committed his share of morally questionable deeds over the years—some might even call them “atrocities.” It was part of staying in business, and staying alive. He had systematically eliminated rivals trying to encroach on his territory. He had closed deals with hot lead and cold steel instead of smiles and handshakes. He had transported cargos of uncut jolt and high explosives without thinking twice. He had never purposefully messed with women and kids, though. And when he had sent another trader or coldheart on the last train west, it had always been a chill-or-be-chilled situation, and it was usually face-to-face, if not nose-to-nose.
The horror he had seen at Padre had transformed him, and not in a good way. Images of the dead and dying in that shantyville were branded into the root of his brain. Whenever he managed to grab a few winks of sleep, they invariably shook him awake. He came to gasping for air, spitting mad, fingers clawing for the butt of his stainless-steel .45 Smith wheelgun, looking around for someone to chill.
The Nuevo-Texicans’ passing hadn’t been quick or clean, not like getting shot or stabbed or fragged by shrap. They had disintegrated from the inside out, cooked in their skins by fever, laying helpless in pools of their own bodily waste. These were folks he’d done business with for years. Folks he respected. He even knew their kids by name. Kids who’d died the same awful way. He’d had three weeks to stew over what had happened to them, and why.
From the evidence on the scene it looked like disease had ravaged more than half the population before the pirates showed up. Tom had never seen or heard of anything like it. Of the islanders who were stricken by the plague, no one recovered. It was one hundred percent debilitating and one hundred percent fatal. And that wasn’t the whole story. The outbreak had peaked just in time for the naval assault and invasion.
An unlucky turn of fate?
Harmonica Tom didn’t think so.
The Nuevo-Texicans were anything but pushovers. Every man, woman and child older than the age of eight could handle a blaster, and they had plenty of ammo and heavy automatic weapons. Through cagey barter they had accumulated some explosives, too—they had a good stock of Claymore anti-pers mines. For thirty years the islanders had successfully defended their grounded freighter and its stores against all comers. The question was, could a small force of Matachìn have overwhelmed the hardened, battle-tested defenses and superior numbers without help from the plague?
Definitely not, Tom had concluded. The pirates lacked the manpower to take Padre Island hill by hill, and long-distance shelling alone couldn’t do the job.
Disease as a weapon of war, of conquest, of genocide wasn’t anything new in the history of the planet. Tom remembered reading about small pox–infected blankets somewhere in his shipboard collection of predark books. Long before Armageddon, they had been handed out to reservation Indians to make them sick and wipe them out. The how of what had happened at Padre was a mystery that might never be solved, but Harmonica Tom was damn well sure the appearance of the plague was no coincidence.
The objective of the invasion by sea hadn’t been simple, familiar robbery, either. The Matachìn had blown apart the beached freighter that contained all of the islanders’ worldly goods, and having done that, they just left it to burn, as if it held nothing worth stealing. The objective apparently had been the destruction of all life and property. Tom took that as an insult to Deathlands, and to the best of its hard-pressed survivors. Moreover, he took it as a personal affront.
And then there was the matter of Ryan Cawdor and his five companions.
No doubt about it, he had dragged those good folks into a world of trouble and hurt. They’d wanted to head east to off-load the 125-pound cache of C-4 they’d snatched, but he’d told them they’d get a better price if they sailed west and dealt with the Padre Islanders. When the shit hit the fan on Padre, things had broken badly for Cawdor and the others. They were still alive when Tom had hightailed it for Tempest, but the last he’d seen of them, they were pinned down by pirates who were closing in fast. If they had managed to live through the assault, they would have been taken as slaves for the galley ships. In the three weeks since Tom had made his solo escape, they could have all died at their oars.
Death en route was a definite possibility.
More than once he had come across big-ass sharks lazily schooling around a headless floating torso with flesh hanging from it in a pale, bloodless fringe. Every time he saw the rad-blasted black fins circling on the surface, he’d divert course to see if it was anyone he knew.
Harmonica Tom had a very straightforward rule for survival that had proved itself over the years: when the odds were good, hit; when the odds were shit, git.
No way could he fight the convoy at sea and hope to win. There were too many opposing vessels, and three of them had massive diesels and twice his speed. If he tried to engage them in open water with Tempest, he knew he’d be outmaneuvered in no time and once committed to the attack, he’d never escape.
In one sense, the farther south he sailed the longer the odds got; in another sense, they actually improved. Though he had penetrated deep into Matachìn territory, nobody in these parts had ever heard of Harmonica Tom. Off his ship he would be unrecognizable, even to the pirates he had outcaptained and outfought along the treacherous Texican shoals. And if the pirate cities were jam-packed with people like the fire talkers said, that gave him the advantage of invisibility. A man who was careful and quiet could get lost in a crowd.
From the angle of the ship lights relative to the shore, Tom figured the convoy was going to make its first landfall at Veracruz. He backed the throttle to idle but left the engine in gear, then lashed off the helm to maintain a steady course. He’d had three weeks to consider the best plan of action. What he’d come up with involved taking some big chances, but none of them were new.
He opened and swung back the cockpit door, then turned to the box-fed, Soviet PKM pivot mounted on Tempest’s stern rail. Unlocking the canvas-shrouded machine gun from its swivel, he carried it down the steep steps to the cabin. He removed the shroud, then fitted the weapon onto the sandbagged tripod already set up at the foot of the stairs. He opened the feed cover to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered. After angling the barrel up to cover the entryway above and cockpit beyond, he locked the elevation.
Tom scrambled up the stairs and attached the end of a steel trip wire to an eye-screw on the inside of the open door. Descending again, he fed the wire through other strategically placed eyes on the staircase, bulkhead wall and the back edge of the galley table on the far side of the tripod. He tested the run of the wire back and forth for smoothness, then inserted the free end of it through the weapon’s trigger guard. He depressed the trigger until the firing pin snapped on the empty chamber. Holding down the trigger, he looped the wire around it, pinning it as far back as it would go. Up the steps one more time, he pulled the cockpit door closed, which released the tension on the wire and allowed the trigger to snap back to ready position. Back beside the machine gun, he set the safety switch to “fire” and cocked the actuator, racking a live 7.62 mm round.
The next time the cockpit door was opened, the wire would draw tight; at the door’s full, outward arc, the pullback tension would break the trigger and hold it down. The PKM was a sweet blaster, low recoil, no muzzle climb to speak of. It would continue firing until it came up empty—one hundred rounds down the road. Or until someone shut the door. The chances of anyone doing that were slim, unless they were fucking bulletproof.
Tom buckled his holstered Model 625 revolver around his waist. From the galley table he picked up his pride and joy, a nine mill Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD-1 silenced machine pistol. The compact blaster had no rear stock. It weighed in at 7.5 pounds with a loaded, 32-round mag. He slipped the weapon’s quick-release lanyard over his neck; thus suspended, its plastic pistol grip hung even with his belly button. He had traded twenty gold-filled teeth for the mint H&K. Thanks to the widespread practice of dentistry before nukeday and the massive depopulation afterward, abandoned graveyards had become the new Klondike. Gold was slowly being accepted across Deathlands as a universal form of jack.
From a hook on the wall he grabbed a duct-tape-patched, olive-drab poncho and pulled it on over his head. The poncho left his arms free and draped low enough front and rear to keep both blasters out of sight. Though his skin was deeply tanned and weathered, he didn’t know if it was tanned enough to pass for native. To keep his face in shadow he donned a sweat-stained, frayed, olive-drab billcap. There wasn’t much he could do about hiding his sandy-colored, handlebar mustache, except to cut the damn thing off, and he wasn’t about to do that.
Shouldering a preloaded pack, he headed toward the bow, climbing the short flight of steps that led to the foredeck. Back out in the night air, he padlocked the forward companionway door behind him. Then he took a handpainted sign from the pack and wired it securely to the hasp.
Crude red letters on a white background read: Peligro.Danger. The middle of the sign was decorated with a childish skull and cross bones under which was another word: Plaga. Plague.
He made for the stern and jumped down into the cockpit. After padlocking the entry door, he hung a copy of the Danger sign on it. Even if the locals couldn’t read, he hoped the symbol of death would make them think twice before trying to break in. If not, anyone opening the door was going to get a big—and final—surprise.
The stash of C-4 was stowed in a secret compartment under the cabin’s deck. To find it, the surviving intruders would have to tear the ship apart, bulkhead by bulkhead. Tom figured to be back aboard long before that happened. Either that or chilled.
Off Tempest’s starboard bow, the last ship in the pirate convoy was rounding the blinking green light marker and heading into the harbor. Tom untied the wheel and goosed the throttle, steering for the marker buoy. He throttled back again as he cleared the light, slowing to take in the harbor and the glowing city on the far side.
Amazing, he thought as he took in the panorama. Fucking amazing.
Distant horn blasts rolled over the water. They came from the pirate convoy, which was about a mile ahead, motoring along the inside curve of the peninsula at a sedate pace. As it passed in front of the battlements of a stone fort, a flurry of fireworks exploded over the harbor.
Tom took the engine out of gear and let Tempest coast forward. He looked beyond the bursting rockets, beyond the floodlit fort, beyond the tooting convoy, at a four-story industrial complex just north of the city. Nosebleed-high catwalks, huge, bottle-shaped holding tanks, smokestacks, cinder-block buildings—it was all lit up as bright as day.
The seagoing trader’s face lit up, too.
He realized it was a power-generating station, probably of predark manufacture and still going strong after more than a century in operation. Diesel-burning by the looks of the smoke, it had to be the source of the massive quantities of electricity in evidence around him. From his reading of twentieth-century books, Tom knew electricity in abundance was what drove the engine of social progress and material comfort, two things sorely absent in the Deathlands. He also knew that seventy or so pounds of properly placed C-4 could inflict massive damage on the power plant.
Maybe the locals had the technology and skills to fix it, maybe not. If not, it was going to be lights out on Veracruz, forever—every nightfall the murdering bastards would have cause to remember the name of Harmonica Tom.
Inside the harbor, it was much muggier; he found himself sweating bullets under the poncho. Peering through binocs, he saw all the armed men gathered on the stone fort’s dock, waving at the convoy. He also saw the cannon barrels sticking out from the battlements. No way was he going to try to motor Tempest past them. He had avoided a boarding party so far, and that’s how he wanted to keep it. There were no patrol boats in sight, no one to challenge his entering the harbor. That much confidence in their command of the sea made Tom conclude that no one had dared to challenge the Matachìn for a very long time. The other boats under way in the harbor were all moving the same direction he was, but they were more than a thousand yards in front of him, swinging in one by one to join the happy parade following the pirate fleet.
Tom motored closer to the peninsula’s shore, looking for a place to tie up as close to the harbor entrance as possible. If everything went right for him and wrong for Veracruz, getting out was going to be a hell of a lot harder than getting in.
He swung in alongside a ruined freighter dock that jutted into the bay. Pools of light thrown by mercury vapor lamps on stanchions revealed clusters of small boats moored to the inside of the pier. They were a mixture of predark, motor and sail pleasure craft converted to commercial use. And there were shit-hammered fishing boats with peeling-paint, plywood cabins. The boats that couldn’t find mooring space were rafted gunwhale to gunwhale.
Poking ahead cautiously, Tom could see there was no free dock space, so he had to raft up, too. He tossed out his fenders and pulled in beside a shabby fishing boat, then made Tempest fast to its bow and stern cleats.
There was no one aboard the fishing boat; no one on any of the boats that he could see.
Tom shouldered his pack and jumped onto the fishing boat. There wasn’t any C-4 in the bag. If he got caught with the blasters, he figured it was no big deal. But if he got caught with high explosives, his captors would want to know what he intended to do with them, and if there was more.
The four-pane woodframe windows in the side of the homemade cabin looked like they had been salvaged from a house. There were sun-faded girly pics stuck to the insides, facing out, so the crew could see them and be inspired. On the far side of the fishing boat a steel ladder was affixed to the pier. He climbed the last few rungs cautiously, poking his head up to take in the terrain.
&
nbsp; The dock area looked as deserted as the boats, except for the rats scampering at the edges of the shadows. In front of him was a wrecked cinder-block warehouse, three stories high. The metal roof had partially caved in, the near wall had collapsed. Someone had started scavenging the fallen blocks, which were stacked on wooden pallets.
When Tom stepped onto the dock, it seemed to move under him. He was still trying to get his land legs when someone shouted at him from the darkness inside the warehouse. Tom saw a pinpoint of light, a tiny red-hot coal. He tugged the brim of his hat down to further hide his face.
A short, stout man in a straw cowboy hat and red sash stepped into view, puffing on a thin black cigar. He held a sawed-off, bluesteel 12-gauge in the crook of his left arm. It was hammerless with a full rear stock and a leather shoulder sling. In the hard light from the mercury lamp Tom could see food stains on the front of the guy’s white dress shirt; they were bright orange, like chili sauce.
The sound of the hullabaloo surrounding the pirates’ arrival drifted over them. As it did so, the guard’s round, brown face twisted into a scowl. He was not a happy camper. He was missing all the fun. Tom caught a whiff of the burning tobacco and it reminded him how long it’d been since he’d had a decent smoke.
The guard addressed him in a guttural growl.
Tom couldn’t make heads or tails of what the guy said; the accent was so thick he couldn’t even be sure it was in Spanish. His command of that language came from memorizing an old college textbook he’d rescued from a bonfire in the Linas. He had mastered all the grammar and vocabulary, but he had no practical speaking or listening experience.
“Buenas noches,” Tom said, turning slightly to the side so the guard couldn’t see him drop his right hand under the poncho. The trader had a choice to make: to either pull out the little leather pouch full of gold teeth and pay the man whatever he wanted to go away, or to reach for the grip of his silenced submachine gun and make him go away forever.
