by James Axler
Krysty read her thoughts. They were the same desperate, anguished thoughts that she had.
That they might already be too late to save Ryan.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I just woke up.”
“Oh, God,” Mildred groaned. She let her face fall into her manacled hands.
“What is it?”
“The wind’s hard behind us now,” Mildred told her. “Don’t you see? No matter how far south we’ve come, to retrace our route and return to Veracruz we’re going to have to beat back against it. We’re going to have to zigzag, tacking back and forth the whole way. It’ll take us twice as long to cover the same ground, maybe longer.”
Krysty felt her knees go soft again; her head was spinning. She had to clutch the bed frame harder to keep from falling. Had she and the companions been kidding themselves all along? Thinking that they actually had the power to do something to save Ryan? Had they chosen to ignore the real extent of their predicament and his because it was too horrible for them to deal with? Had they clung to a comfortable lie because it had gotten them through the night?
The awful truth was now staring Krysty full in the face.
No predark whitecoat technical wonder, no mat-trans system, no airship, not even a high-speed, gasoline-powered watercraft was going to pull this rabbit out of a hat. There was no way to reverse the impending course of events. Time and circumstance had finally conspired to defeat them.
If Ryan’s survival depended on the companions’ help, he was doomed.
Krysty sagged against the bunk frame. The love of her life was gone forever. Her prehensile hair drew up into curls around her neck, ears and temples, withdrawing to seek safety and comfort from the gnawing pain.
“This is the end of everything,” she told Mildred, her voice catching and breaking on the last word. Tears rolled from the corners of her emerald-green eyes; her lower lip and chin began to quiver uncontrollably. She was losing it and she didn’t care. “This is the end of us.”
Mildred put a hand on Krysty’s shoulder and squeezed. “We’ve got to go back after him,” she said. “No matter how long it takes to get there. We’ve got to take over this ship and go back for him.”
Krysty just stared at her, the tears still falling freely.
“We can’t grieve over a death that hasn’t happened yet,” Mildred said. “And may never happen. You’re letting your exhaustion get the better of you. You’ve got to keep fighting it. We all have to. Until we go back and see for ourselves, we won’t know whether they really killed him or not. Anything is possible. We can’t count Ryan out. Not ever. No matter the odds.”
“I know that.”
“He wasn’t counting on our help to get away.”
“I know that, too.” Krysty backhanded the wetness on her cheeks and with an effort took hold of herself.
“We have to focus all our attention on turning the ship around,” Mildred said. “That’s our goal. And to reach it, first we’ve got to get out of these shackles.”
“You’re right, of course, you’re right,” Krysty said, nodding. Then another wave of weakness struck, this time even more severe. She shut her eyes and hung on for dear life until it passed. “Damn it, Mildred,” she said, “why am I feeling so dizzy? And why am I so hungry?”
“I don’t feel so great, either,” the doctor admitted. “And I could eat my own boot sole right now if I had something to cut it up with. It’s probably just a side effect of the starvation. We’ve been without full rations for weeks while rowing our butts off. All of a sudden we’re eating our fill and doing nothing. Our bodies don’t know how to react to the change. That plus the accumulated exhaustion and stress, mixed in with the roll of a strange ship. I think whatever it is, it’ll pass quickly.”
“It better happen soon.”
Krysty didn’t bring up the possibility of using her Gaia power to break the shackles. Nor did Mildred. They both knew it was an absolute, last gasp resort. Krysty was drained as it was. Tapping into that vast energy source would incapacitate her completely, making her a burden instead of an asset in the takeover of the ship.
A wave impact slammed Krysty’s hipbones against the edge of the bunk so hard it made her moan in pain. Since she had gotten out of bed, there had been a distinct change in the ship’s movement. The yaw and pitch of the deck had become more extreme, the vibrations of the hull as it slammed into wave troughs much stronger. The sound of the wind outside had grown louder; it shrieked through the lines. The seas were getting bigger, steeper, more jumbled. The weather was definitely worsening.
Then the cabin’s door bolts clacked back. The door swung open, revealing the two female whitecoats. They stood in the corridor, their short legs braced against the roll of the deck, swaying back and forth as they bore trays of food. They were grinning to beat the band. White teeth. Sparkling black eyes.
So happy.
They stepped into the cabin and uncovered the plates they carried, releasing trapped spicy and oh-so-enticing aromas. The meal consisted of some kind of shredded meat—beef or pork—rolled up in corn tortillas and smothered in a deep red sauce and melted gobs of white cheese. On the side of the plate was a big dollop of squashed-up beans, again topped with melted cheese.
Mildred thanked the little women in Spanish as she accepted the plate and fork they handed up to her bunk.
The smell of the food close up made Krysty’s mouth water. She couldn’t hold herself back. She held the plate up to her chin and shoveled it down, groaning with pleasure, hardly pausing for breath. She and Mildred scraped the metal plates with the edges of their forks to get the last drops of sauce and melty cheese.
The whitecoats poured them cups of water to wash it down with.
As Krysty finished a second cup, Mildred tried to engage the women in conversation. She spoke at length in their language, asking questions, but they didn’t say a word in return. They just smiled and nodded at her, and smiled at each other.
Mebbe they were under orders not to speak to us, Krysty thought. Then her mind turned to other, more important things. She and Mildred needed to open their wrist and ankle cuffs; that was the first order of business. To do that, they needed a tool, something to pick the lock with.
Something metal.
As Krysty stacked the licked-clean plates on top of each other, while Mildred held the whitecoats’ attention with rapid-fire Spanish, she managed to sneak out her fork and slip it up her sleeve.
The merry little whitecoats didn’t seem to notice the missing utensil when they took away the plates and cups.
Krysty waited until they had closed and locked the door from the outside before showing Mildred the prize.
“That just might do it,” the physician said.
“Needs a bit of a minor adjustment first,” Krysty said. She used the face of the steel bed frame to carefully bend three of the tines over and out of the way, forming a makeshift lock pick with the fourth. “Try to hold your feet still.”
Krysty inserted the fork tine into the ankle manacle’s keyhole and Mildred dangled her legs off the edge of the top bunk. The way the boat was sloshing around, it wasn’t easy to hit the target.
After a few moments of fumbling around in the keyhole to no effect, Krysty had to stop and straighten. Lowering her head combined with the motion of the ship had made the dizziness return.
“Did you ask the whitecoats what time it is?” Krysty said.
“I asked them several times. They wouldn’t answer. They just giggled. Strangest whitecoats I’ve ever seen.”
“You need to hold your feet still.”
Mildred pressed her hands against her shins, pinning her heels to the bed frame.
Krysty got the tine back inside the keyhole and began digging around, trying to trip the mechanism.
After a minute or two she was forced to stop again. “This isn’t working,” she told Mildred. “We’re bouncing around too much. I can’t get pressure on the latch with the point of the pick. It keeps sl
ipping off.”
“Let me jump down off here, then,” Mildred said. “If I sit on your bunk, it’ll give you a better angle and I can hold my feet flat on the bed. It should make it easier for you to work.”
Mildred climbed down and hopped onto the lower bunk. Krysty sat on the edge of the bed and resumed poking around inside the keyhole. The change in position offered only a slight improvement. Every time the ship bottomed out in a wave trough, Krysty had to start over.
Mildred’s eyes slowly closed, her breathing deepened, and her head dropped to her chest. When her chin hit her breastbone, she woke up with a start. “Oops, conked out there for a minute.”
“Are you okay?”
Mildred adjusted a pillow behind her back. “Yeah, I just need to get a little more comfortable.”
In seconds, Mildred was sound asleep and snoring.
Krysty kept working on the lock, but to no avail. It got harder and harder to find the pressure point inside the mechanism. She worked until she was too sleepy to concentrate. Then she had to stop.
And when she did, she, too, almost immediately fell asleep. She came to with a jerk when the ship did another resounding bellyflop. Krysty realized she was on the verge of passing out. She had the presence of mind to hide the fork inside the top of her boot before that happened.
She looked up at the top bunk. It might as well have been Mount Everest. No way could she make it up there. Krysty crawled in beside Mildred on the narrow mattress and the moment she closed her eyes she was dead to the world.
Chapter Thirteen
From the depths of the sweltering dungeon came the chant “Chu-cho, Chu-cho, Chu-cho.” On the eve of the execution of Ryan’s double, the other prisoners were saluting him. There were no red sash guards wandering the corridors to make them shut up. Nobody cared what they said or what they did inside the squalor of their cavelike cells. They were already ghosts.
But they were passionate ghosts.
And their standard-bearer was about to take the last train west.
Then the chanting turned to spirited singing and clapping. Ragged, off-key, out-of-time, the rousing, oompah-pah ballad echoed through the half darkness. Ryan could pick out his cell mate’s name in the refrain, over and over again.
“What’s all that about?” Ryan asked.
“It’s the story of my very first revenge against the priests and red sashes put to music,” Chucho replied.
“Touching.”
Chucho shrugged. “They are my people and they love me, but they don’t really know me. They only know my legend, the myth I created. They are in love with a man I fashioned out of smoke.”
“Sounds like you did a hell of a job.”
“No, it wasn’t me who made it happen,” Chucho said. “My people gave it substance because they needed so badly for it to be true. We have endured far too much, for far too long at the hands of the Atapul dynasty. I supplied the hope, they put the flesh on it and pumped it full of blood.”
Gradually the strains of the song lost steam and faded away. Though the dungeon’s background noises returned to scattered moans and screams for help, and pleas for a merciful death, there were occasional shouts of Chucho’s name and “Viva!”
Ryan figured they’d been back in the cell five or six hours, which meant it had to be getting on to evening outside. His thoughts returned to Krysty, J.B., Doc, Mildred and Jak, dragged off to who knew where, for who knew what. He and the companions had been separated before, and by even greater distances and obstacles. But never as prisoners. Always one or the other had had their freedom and room to operate.
Under the circumstances how lost, how vulnerable would they be without him? Could they pull it together aboard ship to escape and save themselves? Ryan felt an uncomfortable twinge of doubt. The Matachìn were not only accustomed to handling slaves, they had made a science out of it, using restraints, starvation and physical and mental exhaustion, and a minimum number of enforcers to get the job done. Their method left no wiggle room whatsoever. In the three weeks the companions had been captives at sea, there hadn’t been a single moment when the tables could have been turned. Ryan flat out didn’t know if his friends could survive, let alone find a way to free themselves. And the not-knowing sat like a ten-pound cannonball in the pit of his stomach.
Chucho nudged him with an elbow and broke his unhappy train of thought.
Ryan’s double produced a sliver of bone about two inches long. “Let me see to your shackles,” he said.
“If you take them off me now, the red sashes are bound to notice.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll show you.”
With deft flicks of the pick, Chucho unlocked Ryan’s wrist and ankle cuffs. The manacles dropped with a clank to the damp stone floor. For the first time in weeks Ryan was able to take a stride longer than two feet. He paced the width of the cell, stretching his legs.
“Now we have to put them back on.”
Chucho lifted the hem of the cloth wrapped around his waist and teased out a bunch of the four-foot-long threads. He closed the cuffs back around Ryan’s ankles and secured them in that position with winds of thread that in the dim light were almost invisible. Outside, at night, they would be invisible. Chucho did the same with the wrist cuffs. “When you want the shackles to come off,” he told Ryan, “just pull the chains between them tight and the threads will break. Be careful, though, don’t stretch the chains too much when they’re walking us out of here. We don’t want them to fall away before we’re ready to make our move.”
Ryan heard distant boots scraping on the stone floor, headed their way. Then the prisoners started yelling, stamping their feet and rattling their bars. It sounded like feeding—or breeding—time at a mutie zoo.
“Are they coming for us now?” Ryan said.
Chucho smiled and shook his head. “No, the red sashes are bringing the condemned their last meal. Our fellow prisoners can smell the goodies. That’s why they are making such a fuss.”
“Must smell pretty damn good, then.”
“Compared to raw rat butt hole, anything smells good.”
Four red sashes approached the outside of the cell. One held a pair of big ceramic bowls; one held a pair of glass bottles; two carried scatterguns. The gunners poked their shouldered weapons through the bars, giving the food-bearers cover as they opened the door and set the meal on the floor.
Ryan did a visual inventory from the far side of the cell: whole roasted chickens, potatoes, maybe tomatoes, some other vegetables, and beakers of something red to drink, probably wine.
After leaving the food within reach, the red sashes backed out of the cell and relocked the door. They didn’t stick around to watch the condemned eat. They left without uttering a word.
Ryan could smell the food from ten feet away, and it smelled wonderful. He wasn’t the only one who caught wind of it. As soon as the food-bearers took their leave, rats came hipping and hopping down the corridor. First in ones and twos, then in dozens. They milled anxiously just beyond the bars, wanting to rush in and have it, but they were afraid of the light and the prisoners inside.
Ryan hadn’t eaten for a very long time. He hadn’t eaten well for even longer. He made a beeline for the food before the rats summoned up the necessary courage. With his bare hands he ripped a leg and thigh from one of the chicken carcasses and with the juices running down his forearm was about to stuff most of it into his mouth when Chucho stopped him with a hand.
“Don’t eat it,” he said.
“Because they spit in it?” Ryan countered. “Who gives a damn?”
“Not spit.”
“Piss? Who cares?” Ryan tried to raise the chicken to his mouth, but Chucho stopped him again.
“No,” Chucho insisted.
“Come on, you’re not telling me they shit in it!”
“No, they added las opiatas. Morfina. Drugs to make us weak as kittens. So we don’t try to escape and so we don’t fight so hard when they torture us.”
�
�I figured they’d want us screaming in pain,” Ryan said, tossing the untouched chicken back into the bowl in disgust. “Screaming is always a big crowd pleaser.”
“Oh, we would still scream,” Chucho assured him. “We’d scream our heads off. The drugs don’t stop a person from feeling pain. You still feel everything they do to you. You just can’t do anything about it. It makes the victims easier for the executioners to deal with, to move around. Like meat puppets with lungs.”
Chucho used a foot to nudge the bowls even closer to the bars, until they were actually touching them. Then he backed away. He motioned for Ryan to move with him to the rear of the cell.
Sensing their opportunity, the bravest of the rats moved in. At first they stuck their heads between the bars, nibbling furtively over the rims of the bowls. Those who were edged out grew bolder and entered the cell to get an open spot at the troughs. In a minute or two, they were eating in a competitive frenzy and their fellows, in droves, were scampering down the corridor to join them.
Chucho signaled Ryan to wait, to have patience.
It didn’t take long. All of a sudden one of the feeding rats did a two-foot back flip, landed belly up with its legs and tail twitching feebly.
It was ignored by the others, and a new rat quickly moved in to take the empty place.
Ryan watched as rats started falling over, one by one. The growing mass of the fallen didn’t stop those behind from sampling the food. Soon the bowls and a surrounding section of stone floor were covered by a pile of furry unconscious bodies.
Laughing, Chucho approached ground zero, which sent the still hungry survivors scurrying out of the cell and down the hall. He started gathering up the rats, two by two. Using threads from his garment he securely tied their tails together, and then flipped them back out in the corridor. He worked quickly, giving the impression this was not the first time he had pulled the trick.
“When they wake up, won’t they be surprised?” he said to Ryan as he cinched his knots tight, making a critter with eight legs and two heads, legs and heads pointing in the opposite direction. “They won’t be able to bite their tails off to escape. To get away they’ll try to kill one another. If one of them succeeds, it will have to drag the corpse of the other behind it.”
