by James Axler
“Why at night?”
“It’s cooler—they’ll draw a bigger crowd.”
“So our best chance of escape is after the trial, during the move.”
Chucho gave him an amused look. “Our best chance surrounded by a thousand red sashes?”
“You’re not giving up?”
“I’ve worked magic before, I just may do it again.”
It suddenly occurred to Ryan that Chucho might not trust him, either. “You don’t have supporters on the outside to rescue you?” he asked.
“You mean, take this fort by force? You must be joking. The only access is either by bridge or by water, and both are defensible from the battlements. To try to break in here is suicide.”
Whatever hand Chucho held, he was keeping it close to his vest. Ryan didn’t see a reason to give him any more information about the companions, how many there were and what they were capable of. By now they were probably miles away, anyway. The odds of their overpowering their captors and returning for him were slim and none.
Ryan felt the stirring of breeze from down the dim corridor, from a distant door opening or closing. It wafted a strong smell of urine.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw something move just inside the cell’s iron bars, a shadow of a shadow, scooting low and fast across the floor.
Without a word, Chucho suddenly whirled and sidearmed the limestone pebble. The rock didn’t clatter and ricochet off on the stone. It thunked into something soft.
Chucho stepped over to the bars and picked up the dead rat by the tail. When he held it up to the light its little curled-up front legs were still twitching.
“Have you had your dinner, my friend?” he asked.
Chapter Nine
Harmonica Tom stood in the bed of the parked pickup, bracketed by his three new amigos. They had pulled over to the shoulder of the road, unable to get any closer to the glow of the city because of the big parade creeping their way. Tom could hear the distant music and chanting. Lit by lamps on tall, steel stanchions, the street around them was already lined with spectators. Some of the audience waved pennants, some held big paper heads on poles.
He recognized the plague head from his own nightmares.
It made his skin crawl.
Tom’s amigos cracked open a fresh bottle. When he was offered more joy juice, he politely declined.
The plague face was of a generic dying man, a synopsis of symptoms rather than an individual likeness. He had no idea why that horror was being displayed. Or why it was mixed in with garishly painted, gargoyle heads. Were they in celebration of things honored or feared, or both?
When he saw Ryan’s face up there, too, Tom stiffened in shock. He shifted the unlit stub of his cigar to the corner of his mouth and clenched it between his teeth. How could these people possibly know what the one-eyed warrior looked like? he asked himself. And why for nuke’s sake would they wave his head about?
Tom didn’t understand the symbolism of the images on display nor the relationship between them, if any. And he was reluctant to ask his brand-new drinking buddies about it. He barely had the language skills to frame an intelligible question in Spanish, let alone understand the answer if it was complicated or lengthy. And he didn’t want to reveal himself as a foreigner just yet.
“Ahí viene el otro gemelo,” his driver buddy said thickly, weaving slightly on his feet as he raised the new bottle to his lips.
After a delay of several very long seconds, Tom’s brain unscrambled two of the three words that had been spoken to him: something was coming; another something was coming. The subject of the sentence was a word missing from his vocabulary, therefore making sense of it was impossible.
Up the road, he could see a trio of stake trucks advancing at a snail’s pace with headlights blazing on high beams. Backlit pirates in full armor and weapons marched in formation in front of the lead truck. As the procession crept forward, the honking horns, music and amplified shouts grew louder and louder.
The parade eventually passed right in front of them.
“El otro gemelo,” said the driver, pointing at a long-haired man with an eye patch standing in the back of the lead truck, glaring down at the crowd. He was surrounded by familiar faces.
At first, Tom couldn’t believe his eyes. Ryan and the others had all survived the long voyage from Padre Island. They looked like they’d been through hell. Their faces were gaunt, as well as cut and bruised. They were in irons. But they were alive and he felt a wave of relief.
A hoarse voice assailed the crowd at the sides of the road through a megaphone loud-hailer. “¡Mira, mira, mira!”
Words Tom immediately recognized.
Lookee, lookee, lookee!
The announcer rode on the lead truck’s running board: a Matachìn commander with dreads piled high on his head.
His heart pounding, Tom automatically reached under the poncho. His fingers closed on the pistol grip of his silenced submachine gun. He only held the weapon for a second, then he let its weight fall back onto the lanyard. Ryan and the companions were surrounded by pirates and armed men in red sashes. Under the circumstances a successful rescue attempt was impossible. To have any hope of saving them, and not dying himself in the effort, he had to pick a more favorable battleground than this. To do that he had to find out where they were being taken.
Because he had no other choice, Tom shouted a telegraphic question into the ear of his drunken friend, “¿Adonde van?”
“San Juan de Ulua, allá.” The man waved the bottle of joy juice in the direction of the illuminated floating fortress.
That made sense. Put the surviving slaves, particularly the most dangerous ones, somewhere they couldn’t escape.
It rankled Tom that there was nothing he could immediately do for Ryan or the others. It rankled him even more that maybe there was nothing he could do for them, ever. He knew it was possible they were going to be taken inside the ancient fort and there immediately chilled. A hard bit of business considering what they’d endured for the last three weeks, but Tom had a bigger score to settle for the Padre Islanders and that had to be seen to first, or it was never going to get done.
Whooping and hollering, his drunken amigos hopped off the tailgate of the pickup and joined the parade as the three trucks in the lead crept around a right turn toward the fort. Without a word, Tom took his leave of them. He jumped down from the opposite side of the pickup. Nobody was looking in his direction as he cut between a pair of huge, rectangular concrete pads, the foundations of warehouses that had been swept clean by Skydark’s tidal waves. Apparently his new friends had already forgotten him. He headed overland at a fast trot, making a beeline for the brightly lit power station compound
Tom’s knowledge of predark power plants was extremely limited. He’d never seen a functional one before—when the sun went down in Deathlands, people lit fires or squatted in the dark. Years back, though, he’d come across an eighteen-page, full-color comic book published in 1999 by Mississippi Power and Light. Tom had no way of knowing it, but the pamphlet in question had originally been a company public relations gimmick, meant to be handed out to schoolchildren on field trips. Among other things, Johnny Kilowatt and the Blackout Gang made fun of environmentalists, and their concern over pollution and global warming—this while touting the enormous benefits of the industry to humankind. Solo sailing the hellscape’s coast gave Tom plenty of time to read and study all the predark material he managed to collect in his travels. From the cartoon schematics in Johnny Kilowatt, he had soaked up the basic elements of large-scale, steam-generated electrical power.
On the other side of the wide swathe of hurricane fence, under the strings of lights that decorated the twelve-story cooling tower and boiler complex, were rows of cylindrical holding tanks for diesel. Tanks big enough to contain ninety thousand barrels of fuel each. According to the disintegrating comic book, diesel was burned to heat water to steam that was then used to turn the turbines and produce electricity.<
br />
The tank farm was an obvious target for some of the C-4, Tom thought. The heat and pressure from a plastique explosion would guarantee ignition. A raging, out-of-control oil fire would make a great distraction, and the dense smoke might help cover Tempest’s exit from the harbor, but after the blaze was either put out or allowed to burn itself out, the tanks could be fairly easily replaced. And so could the fuel if there was still an operational refinery on the coast.
He was looking to do some damage that would be much more long term, perhaps even permanent.
To the left of the main complex, and connected to it by drooping high-tension lines suspended on a series of tall towers, was the main transformer station, which converted the plant’s raw energy into a form that was usable and that could be transmitted over long distances. It, too, was protected by a hurricane-fence perimeter. Even if he completely flattened the step-up station, Tom knew it could be rebuilt if enough spare parts were available.
He continued on to the ten-foot-high fence that surrounded the plant proper. The barrier was in a sad state of repair, rusting, with obvious makeshift entry and exit routes along its length—shortcuts the workers used to get to and from the job site, and for local folk who didn’t want to walk around the huge complex to reach the other side. Tom lifted the edge of a flap cut in the mesh and slipped through.
As he approached the structure, he could see a few workers ten stories above him on the pipeframe catwalks that encased the boiler complex. If they noticed him crossing the compound, they didn’t pay him any mind—which was more evidence that folks cut across the grounds all the time. The workers certainly couldn’t have heard him coming. Up close, the plant’s hum was a dull roar that masked even the sounds of the parade.
Tom located the generator room without difficulty; it was where the noise was the loudest. He tried an exterior door in the three-story, concrete block building and found it unlocked.
Inside the generator room it was so loud he couldn’t hear himself think. It was broiling hot inside, too. Six-hundred-to one-thousand-degree heat blasted off the foot-diameter steam pipes that jutted from the far wall on his right. Banks of overhead lights reflected on the polished concrete floor and the pale green–painted housings of a row of immense machines. The floor vibrated steadily underfoot.
Tom took off his billcap and wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead. Comparing the layout to his memory of the comic book, it was easy to tell which end of the power train was which. Steam energy flowed from the towering boiler first to a high-pressure turbine, the machine on his far right, and from there it was forced back into the boiler through another set of pipes to be reheated. The steam was then pumped through two intermediate-pressure turbines—the second and third machines—and finally into a low-pressure turbine. All four of these units were supported by and connected to one another and to the even more massive generator at the end of the line by a single, 100-foot-long driveshaft. The four turbines turned a huge rotor inside the generator housing, which produced electricity.
A smile passed over Tom’s face as another intriguing fact from the comic came back to him. The weight of the 100-foot driveshaft, of the four-turbine assembly, and of the rotor inside the generator was such that if the rotor ever stopped turning, even for a second, the entire system would become unbalanced, and an attempted restart would not only fail, but it would bring on complete destruction. The comic had made clear that in the event of a power loss, backup emergency power would immediately kick in to maintain a slow turning of the rotor to keep the system operational. Knocking out both power sources simultaneously would bring on the result Tom desired.
Lights out.
For eternity.
He walked down the row of machines, looking for the armored conduit that would indicate the power input lines. As he passed the generator, Tom saw a metal warning sign riveted to the housing above a capped valve that stopped him dead in his tracks. Though it was in Spanish, it used the universal symbol for explosion risk. From what he could make of the words, the system contained hydrogen gas under pressure. Essentially it read, Extreme Danger Of Explosion. Do Not Vent.
From his reading, Tom knew that hydrogen gas was highly flammable when mixed with air. Given the size of the machine and the fact that the gas was under pressure, there was probably a shitload of it inside. Fifteen pounds of properly placed C-4 could simultaneously breach the generator shell and the pressurized inner chamber, and ignite the gas, multiplying the explosive potential big-time.
The resulting fireball and shock wave would turn the generator, the turbines and the connecting driveshaft into so much junk. And they were the parts of the system that most likely could not be replaced. They all required precision engineering and metalwork, and large-scale, high-strength castings.
Tom relit the stub of cigar and managed to suck a final few satisfying puffs from it before he flicked away the soggy remains. If he’d thought to bring his harmonica along with him, at that moment he would have been playing and dancing a jig.
He exited the building and retraced his route to the tear in the perimeter fence. As he walked, heading in the direction of Tempest, he did the math in his head, adding up how much explosive it would take to ignite the tank farm, flatten the transformer station and blow up the generator.
Seventy pounds of C-4, give or take, he figured would bring the Dark Ages to this little corner of the world.
Chapter Ten
A lesser man than Ryan Cawdor, a man who feared eternal damnation, might have seen his last night on Earth as a preview of hell’s coming attractions. The blistering, hammering heat. The pall of sulfurous yellow light thrown from widely spaced electric bulbs. The gut-wrenching melange of decomposition odors. The carpets of rats merrily scampering down the corridor. The sounds of human beings in agony, cursing, moaning, praying. The slow trickle of time passing.
Ryan watched his double sleep, as naked as a baby, on the damp stone floor. The rats gave their cell a wide berth. There were plenty of other, easier meals to be had. For his part, Ryan didn’t sleep at all. He didn’t even try.
The man of action was forced into inaction, into introspection. There was nothing he could do about his predicament, except to wait for it to play out. He fought down the urge to pace the bars like a wild animal, this to burn off pent-up energy. He wanted to reserve his strength right up to the end, even though he knew it was possible, if not likely, that he would die without being able to put up a fight. He never imagined it would come down to something like that. But then again, he never really thought about how he’d end up being chilled. His attitude had always been: why bother? His whole adult life he’d dealt with shit as it flew at him, without worrying about what might happen the next day, or even the next minute. He was into the brown up to his chin now. On his own, unarmed, vastly outnumbered, in chains, and imprisoned, the chances were damn good that this was the one nasty scrape he wasn’t going to walk away from.
During the seemingly endless night, Ryan thought about his son Dean, stolen and lost now perhaps forever, never to be reunited with him. He thought about Krysty and the companions. The people he loved more than anything. He also thought about all the nameless, faceless others he’d chilled, and the legend of violence he was leaving behind. He knew that no matter his intent or the circumstances, he’d be remembered in the Deathlands only by the height of the pile of corpses he’d created.
After uncountable hours had passed, when Chucho finally stirred from sleep, Ryan said to him, “If there’s no lock you can’t pick, how about opening my cuffs and the cell door?”
“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Chucho replied as he stretched his arms over his head. “There’s only one way in and out of here, and to get past it, you’d have to whip the twenty armed red sashes that guard this place. Before you could do that, they’d call for reinforcements from the fort. You’d never see daylight again. And right now that’s my only goal. I’ve been locked away in this fuck hole for weeks now. I want to see the s
un, to feel it on my face one more time before I die.”
“You’re not giving up?”
“Didn’t say that. Our best chance is going to come after nightfall, when we’re transported from here to the place of execution. They don’t have enough red sashes to control the entire route. If we can break through their ranks and make it into the crowds, we’ve got a slim hope of getting out of this.”
“Need our hands and feet free to do that,” Ryan said. “Assuming you can pick the locks on my cuffs, what about yours? They’re welded shut.”
Chucho turned away for a few seconds. When he turned back, he held the empty cuffs by their connecting chain on a fingertip. “You mean these?” he said.
His wrists and the backs of his hands glistened in the electric light.
Effortlessly, Chucho popped the cuffs back on. “Rat fat,” he explained. “The slipperiest mierda on the planet.”
At once Ryan felt a great weight come off his shoulders. If they could both get out of this hell pit, if they could both get free, they could at least go down fighting instead of being butchered like hogs.
Ryan heard the sounds of distant boots scraping on the stone floor. The noises got louder; they were coming their way.
“They’re bringing us a hot breakfast, right?” Ryan said.
Chucho laughed. “If you want desayuno in this place, you’ve got to catch and kill it yourself.”
Twelve red sashes lined up in the corridor outside their cell. They stood an arm’s length from the bars. They weren’t carrying food, but they didn’t come empty-handed, either. Four of them held nooses on poles.
A fifth man, who was apparently in charge, shoved a folded length of cloth through the bars to Chucho. After stepping back out of reach, he growled an order to Ryan’s mirror image.
“The size of my culebra makes these pin-dick red sashes and priests nervous,” Chucho said, flashing his white teeth as he wound the material around his waist, covering his nakedness almost to his knees.
