Dark Resurrection

by James Axler

  When the flash faded, it was lights out.

  Plug pulled.

  The only light that survived was from scattered wag head-and taillights, or combustion. Flames hundreds of feet high raged in the tank farm, but they didn’t illuminate anything past the plant’s perimeter fence. The glorious city had vanished into a field of impenetrable, velvety black.

  Tom sat in the dinghy. Having taken his bearings just before the lights went out, he began rowing down the center canal for the footbridge.

  In the pitch-darkness above him on the left, he heard the red sashes in the fort yelling and cursing. Out there somewhere, a male voice screamed in terror and the cry was cut short by a loud splash.

  As he made for the fort end of the bridge, Tom smelled the oil smoke that was pouring from the tank farm, driven by a slight breeze across the peninsula. Overhead he felt a looming presence. He reached up with the tip of an oar and tapped something solid. He was directly under the footbridge, and therefore out of view of both the fort and the prison—even if they had portable spotlights close to hand. When the bow of the dinghy scraped against the stone pillar, he shipped his oars and turned on his headlamp for a second. Long enough to unzip the duffel and take out a hunk of C-4 and the detonator rigging. He slapped the charge on the bridge’s support and primed it. Then he shut off the headlamp and rowed under the bridge, along its length to the opposite end. It took only five pulls on the oars to reach the other side.

  As he hopped out of the boat and onto the prison island’s quay, he heard the flat whack of muffled blasterfire. It sounded like a volley of 12-gauges. It could have come from Veracruz, or from inside the prison; he couldn’t tell which.

  No one had crossed the bridge above him. Not from the fort or the prison. The sudden blackout appeared to have paralyzed his opposition. At least momentarily.

  After securing the dinghy, with the H&K machine pistol in his right fist, duffel slung over his left shoulder, Tom felt his way along the front of the prison to the arched portal of the entrance. He flicked on his headlamp again to locate the door latch, then quickly shut it off. When he tried to open the door, he found it was bolted from the inside. It took him another ninety seconds to pull another chunk of plastique from the duffel, to pack it into the doorjamb and to insert the trigger and blasting cap.

  Across the canal, along the fort’s ramparts, a few lights were appearing here and there. They were weak, and for sure they weren’t battery-powered flashlights. They were lanterns, and kerosene burners, Tom guessed. Accordingly, there was no focus or penetration of the light they cast, just a ring of illumination around the lantern-bearers. The thickening smoke coming from the tank farm didn’t help the situation, either. There was a lot of yelling back and forth.

  But not at him, this time.

  The red sashes were shouting at one another.

  In the distance, he heard the steady bleating of car horns, a chorus of horns of different pitches, followed by another flurry of shotgun blasts and some sustained autofire—definitely from Veracruz this time.

  Panic was setting in.

  Panic was Tom’s main ally.

  He retreated back along the prison’s front wall, to a little alcove he had noted earlier in the day. He crouched, facing away from the blasts, ducked his head and once again hit the remote detonator’s boom button.

  This time the flash and shock wave were inseparable, and he felt the heat of the double explosion through the back of his poncho. The five-hundred-year-old bridge let out a groan and half of it dropped into the canal with a tremendous splash. The massive prison door blew off its hinges and slammed into the bridge’s decorative columns. Loose bits of both went sailing off into the dark, slapping into the water and the stone facades.

  Tom waited a full minute for the debris to stop falling, then, his ears still ringing, he turned on his headlamp and ran for the prison entrance. A torrent of dust and smoke poured from the gaping hole where the doorway had once been.

  Without pause, he rushed through the entrance, the silenced H&K up and ready to rip. As he stepped across the threshold, even he was taken aback at how rad-blasted dark it was inside.

  Well-digger’s-ass dark.

  Pit-of-hell dark.

  Can’t-see-your-hand-in-front-of-your-face dark.

  The Petzl headlamp’s powerful beam couldn’t pierce the swirling smoke and dust, which was so thick it was hard for him to breathe.

  It occurred to him that maybe he had used a little too much plastique.

  Then he stepped on something that yielded to his weight. He stepped off quickly and kicked at it. Whatever it was, it was loose; it skidded away from the kick. Leaning down, fanning the smoke away from the floor, he saw it was a severed arm. Blown clean out of its socket.

  As Tom moved deeper, the dense clouds began to thin and dissipate. There was no way of telling how many red sashes were inside the anteroom before he blew the door. But looking around, he could tell no one was alive. Red sashes were in large pieces on the floor or their still bodies were covered with blood. Or they had been buried alive. The explosion had caused huge sections of the limestone block ceiling to spawl off, crushing whoever was unlucky enough to be standing beneath.

  The headlamp lit up the floor-to-ceiling iron wall and gate that divided the anteroom from the cell blocks. It lay in a twisted hulk, torn from its mounts in the stone, and wrenched off to one side.

  It was eerily quiet as Tom walked on.

  As though everyone inside had been struck dumb.

  The concentrated stink that rose from the floor, walls and oppressively low ceiling was unreal. He had to stifle the urge to cover his nose.

  The dimpled, sweating limestone wall on his left reflected greasily in the light of the headlamp. The rock had been polished and oiled by thousands upon thousands of palms sliding over it. Then he caught the sound of footsteps and whimpering, both of which were coming his way.

  Out of the darkness beyond the forty-foot penetration of the Petzl’s beam, four red sashes staggered forward. As they stepped into the light, he saw their faces were covered in white dust. They held their arms outstretched like blind men, then shielded their eyes to block the painful glare.

  They were all armed with double-barreled 12 gauges, even if the weapons were shoulder slung, even if they weren’t looking for a fight.

  Sometimes fights just happened, ready or not.

  Tom didn’t slow down. At point-blank range he shot them down like dogs, stitching 9 mm lead across their chests, sending them sprawling. The stutter of the silenced machine pistol was drowned out by the whine of through-and-throughs ricocheting off the walls and floor.

  He walked past the twitching bodies, straining his eyes and his ears for some sign of Ryan and the others.

  Huddled at the foot of the left-hand wall, he came across a pair of priests in red robes and tall, conical hats. They cowered there, kneeling in a shallow pool of some unidentifiable liquid; they appeared to be unarmed. They, too, were coated in rock dust. When the priests saw his light coming toward them, they started clapping their hands and mumbling something Tom couldn’t quite make out. But it sounded like they were thanking their godawful gods for rescuing them from the darkness.

  Moving closer, he recognized the one thanking the loudest as the spider-bellied bastard who’d read the execution order for Ryan and his double.

  If they weren’t part of the solution, they were part of the problem.

  As he walked past, Tom shot them both once in the back of the head. Thwack. Thwack.

  Priests in a puddle.

  Problems solved.

  A little farther on Tom came to a fork off the main corridor, a left-branching hallway. His headlamp beam swept over and into the first of a long bank of cramped cells. On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling bars, he saw a filthy, nearly naked human figure. The whites of the man’s eyes shone for an instant, radiating terror, before they squinted shut.

  Two eyes shining back told him it wasn’t Ry
an.

  Tom looked into the next cell. There was a heap of rags on the floor. A bare foot with a grime-encrusted sole stuck out from under it.

  “Ryan?” Tom said softly.

  No answer.

  No movement.

  Farther down the dank hallway, beyond the range of the headlamp, and from deeper in the dungeon around him, the survivors were starting to stir, they were slowly coming to life. Tom had no idea how many prisoners were caged in the pitch-dark, but the noise they made was getting louder and louder. Shouts. Moans. Screams. Cries for help. Very soon, he realized, the din and the echoes of the din down the cavelike halls would make it impossible to hear himself think. He had to locate his targets and get them the hell out before things deteriorated even more.

  Tom didn’t have time to go up and down the labyrinthine passages, searching for Ryan and the others cell by cell. He didn’t have a map of the interior. Getting lost was not an option.

  Rather than shout Ryan’s name down the cell blocks as he walked the main passage, something that he knew would certainly draw dozens if not hundreds of affirmative replies from the other prisoners hoping for rescue, he had a better idea.

  A signal only Ryan would recognize.

  Tom reached into his hip pocket and took out his harmonica. After wetting his lips, he began to play a loud and lively tune with his left hand while he held the H&K up and ready in his right. The bright, rhythmic notes echoed and reechoed, bouncing down the winding corridors.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Time to start the dying…”

  Fright Mask’s saliva-spraying declaration turned out to be prophetic, but not at all in the way he’d intended.

  The noose hung suspended two feet above Ryan’s head as he knelt on the floor beside Chucho. The one-eyed warrior strained to hold himself in check as the red sash pole-bearer began to lower the garrote-on-a-stick. He knew that when the loop was snugged up around his neck, the ability to free himself from the ankle and wrist cuffs would become irrelevant. Ryan hated all forms of restraint with a newfound passion—he had been locked up in them night and day for more than three weeks. And he hated this particular brand of restraint the most of all. There was no doubt in his mind that the noose pole was another of the Matachìns’ inventions: it smacked of their brutal ingenuity. Strangulation at a distance of five feet was the perfect way to control prisoners who had nothing left to lose. Unconsciousness was just a cord-pull away.

  As luck would have it in this case, a very distant cord-pull.

  Before the red sash could drop the loop, the entire structure, from the bedrock-coral foundation up, was rocked by a tremendous explosion. The floor shuddered violently underfoot, limestone dust from the ceiling rained down on Ryan’s head. The noose-bearers froze, poles extended, looking wide-eyed at each other instead of their quarry.

  Then the lights went out.

  Suddenly it was darker than dark. And the darkness was like a blow to the head. Like having the eyes plucked from their sockets, and the sockets then stuffed with wads of cotton wool. Perspective, proportion, proximity, all were gone, as was all sense of up and down.

  It was so dark no one dared move.

  No one except Ryan Cawdor.

  Perhaps he had an advantage already being half-blinded. Perhaps his life in Deathlands had trained him to react by instinct, to seize opportunities at a moment’s notice. Eight feet away in the pitch-black, the cell door stood ajar. His enemies were caught flatfooted.

  “Now,” he said softly to his look-alike.

  Further explanation was unnecessary.

  Ryan and Chucho snapped the threads that held their heavy wrist and ankle cuffs in place, but neither man tossed the manacles aside. Instead, they gripped them by the middle of their connecting chains—turning the restraints instantly into wicked, close range, offensive weapons.

  In effect, battle axes or nunchakus.

  Great minds thought alike.

  Shifting his brace of chain link and heavy steel bands to his left hand, Ryan found and grabbed hold of his double’s wrist. Again, no explanation was necessary; it was a necessity that had instantly occurred to them both. Chucho in turn locked his fingers around Ryan’s wrist. Not just twins anymore, but conjoined twins. Thus connected, they couldn’t lose each other in the dark, and they wouldn’t hit each other by accident.

  As one, the two men rose from their knees, windmilling their manacles as they rushed forward, toward the open cell door. Ryan’s cuffs immediately thunked into something.

  The something squealed like a stuck pig as it fell back.

  He laid a second blow on top of the first, putting his entire body behind it, as though he was trying to drive in a spike with a sledgehammer. On his right, Chucho was doing the same to his own noose-bearer, only with a much more spectacular effect. Hot blood, presumably from a head wound, sprayed over the side of Ryan’s face and neck as the other pole-man collapsed under a rain of whistling blows.

  In his mind, Ryan had locked in the last-known position of Fright Mask relative to the cell’s exit. In two quick strides his left shoulder was brushing against the edge of the iron doorjamb. He pulled Chucho through the doorway and out into the corridor.

  “¡Fuego! ¡Fuego!” the governor-general howled.

  His red sash scattergunners didn’t pause to consider that there were friendlies in the line of fire. That’s how afraid of Chucho they were. They cut loose blindly into the blackness, shooting their weapons from the hip. Double muzzle-flashes lit up the inside of the cell. In the narrow, cavelike, enclosed space the flurry of 12-gauge reports was deafening.

  It was spitting-distance target practice without a target.

  Stray buckshot ricocheted off the back wall and whined down the hallway.

  Ears ringing, the acrid smell and taste of burned gunpowder filling his nose and mouth, Ryan turned in Fright Mask’s direction. As he did so, he ran headlong into a red sash on his left. Rocking back on his heels, Ryan swung the manacle nunchakus, clobbering the man out of the way. The red sash’s shotgun clattered as it hit the floor.

  “¡Otra vez! ¡Otra vez! ¡Fuego!”

  Ryan caught something new in the governor-general’s voice: it was the shrill edge of panic.

  But al Modo hadn’t taken into account the trouble his red sashes would have reloading their weapons in absolute darkness, this while retreating under toe-to-toe attack. As they fumbled to break open the actions of their double barrels, as they fumbled in their pockets for more shells, they lost their bearings. And in the suffocating, all-encompassing blackness, once lost, bearings could never be found. The corridor echoed with their whimpers and frantic curses.

  Meanwhile, with Chucho in tow, Ryan had zeroed in on the sound of the governor-general’s voice. Fright Mask was very close. Shifting the brace of chains to his right hand, Ryan lunged forward with his left, fingers outstretched, searching for a grip on a soft, vulnerable throat. Instead, they closed on a handful of piled dreadlocks. Before he could jerk down and drive the general to his knees, the matted coils of hair slipped out of his grasp like so much greased rope.

  As al Modo backed away into the nothingness, he yelled for help.

  The governor-general was in no mood to stand and fight, but he had no choice. Help was not coming soon enough.

  Ryan heard the sound of steel on steel: al Modo had drawn his ceremonial saber. Then came the hiss as it sliced back and forth in the pitch-black. The breeze it made brushed his face.

  Forehand.

  Backhand.

  He felt Chucho squeeze his wrist hard, a warning. As the next backhand slashed, Ryan’s look-alike struck with his nunchaku, catching the stroke at its weakest point, its terminus. Cuffs and chain screeched across the long blade.

  Fright Mask growled as he tried to free his saber from the temporary trap.

  But by then Ryan had gathered himself a handful of golden epaulette. He drove his shoulder into the center of the general’s chest, firing upward through his legs from the b
alls of his feet, throwing his entire weight into the strike. It caught Fright Mask off balance and lifted him clear of the ground.

  To Ryan’s surprise, their dual trajectory ended abruptly, and much, much sooner than he’d expected. They both slammed into something solid. The impact with the corridor wall sandwiched the breath out of al Modo and he dropped. Ryan felt a stab of pain in his neck, and momentarily saw stars as he, too, slumped to the floor.

  “Let go of my wrist,” Ryan told Chucho, who had been dragged to his knees behind them.

  Reaching around the front of Fright Mask’s neck, Ryan grabbed the free end of the manacle chain he held, then he pulled it up past the exposed throat, over the hideous face. He couldn’t see what he was doing, but he could hear and feel the chain links scraping against the golden fangs. Ryan jerked back hard, yanking the manacles into the corners of the governor-general’s mouth like a horse’s bridle. Jamming a knee in the middle of the man’s spine, he leaned back, applying pressure to the jaw hinges.

  “Nuh! Nuh!” al Modo whined, shaking his head, twisting his torso, trying to claw backward to reach Ryan’s surviving eye.

  “Are you choking him to death?” Chucho asked with obvious delight. “I wish I could see…”

  “Choking is too good for him,” Ryan answered. At that moment he was thinking about revenge. He was thinking about the Padre Islander boy, Garwood Reed, about how he had died. “This is for the boy he had butchered on the church steps,” Ryan said. “Tell the piece of shit that.”

  Chucho translated.

  And as his double spoke the words, as the words sank in, Fright Mask went wild in Ryan’s grasp, flailing his arms and kicking out with his legs in a last-ditch attempt to free himself.

  Ryan twisted the chain into a knot behind the governor-general’s head. With the links holding down his tongue, Fright Mask couldn’t cry out. They didn’t stop him from slobbering, though. When Ryan felt that cold, stinking slime smear across the back of his hand, it was his turn to go crazy. He started ramming the man’s face into the limestone wall. The sculpted nose broke on the first impact, then the golden fangs, then the rest of his front teeth, then both his jaws.