by James Axler
“How long will it take to get there?” Ryan asked Tom.
The trader pointed at a dot on the map that read Colón, a city at the Atlantic end of the canal. “A week, mebbe ten days, depending on the wind. If it dies on us, it’ll die for the black sloop, too. We shouldn’t lose any ground on them.”
“They have a full day’s start on us now,” Ryan said. “How are we going to make it up?”
“Don’t know if we can,” Tom said. “Depends on how much of a hurry they’re in to off-load their cargo, how much sail they put up.”
“Even if we can’t catch them at sea, maybe we can get to them before they reach the other coast,” Ryan said.
“The trail across the isthmus to the far side is fifty miles long,” Chucho said. “It’s hard going through jungle and there are many, many places for ambush.”
“Then we’d better catch them before they leave Colón,” Ryan said.
Chapter Seventeen
J. B. Dix stood near the bow of the black ship as it porpoised through white-capped, milky-azure seas. As the ship lurched, he leaned this way and that, swaying on the balls of his feet, eyes half shut. He felt like he was floating a foot or two above the deck’s rough planking.
Defeat.
It tasted like chicken.
In a spicy red sauce.
Lassitude had set in on the second day out of Veracruz, a combination of the stultifying heat of the tropics, which he was not used to, and the realization that Ryan was by then most likely chilled, and that he had been unable to do anything to prevent it.
A hand pressed the middle of his back and gave him a hard shove toward the port rail. Then came a familiar gobbledygook command from behind.
J.B. didn’t understand Dr. Montejo’s words, but by now he knew what they meant. Get moving. Every day, once a day, the head whitecoat took the captives up on the top deck for limited exercise and a dose of fresh air. They were brought up individually, in chains and at blasterpoint. J.B. and the whitecoat were trailed by a very bored Matachìn holding a 9 mm submachine gun by its pistol grip.
J.B. lurched onward, face into the wind, forced to take baby steps by his manacles. How many days had they been sailing south nonstop? It was hard to keep count. At least a week, perhaps more.
The idea that he and the others could overcome their captors had turned out to be a pipedream, a bitter pill to swallow. As on the slave galley, the Matachìn had given them no window of opportunity for revolt. They’d foreseen and plugged every possible crack.
J.B. hadn’t laid eyes on Mildred or Krysty since they’d left Veracruz. The separated companions had yelled back and forth to one another through their cabin-cell doors, but they could hardly make out the words for the intervening walls, the wind in the sails and the loud, constant hiss of the hull sliding through the sea. As of a few minutes ago, the women were still alive.
On the morning of the third day Doc had deduced that they were being drugged at every meal. It appeared their only choice was not to eat, but if they didn’t eat, they’d be too weak to stage a successful escape. It was another cruel irony, something the pirates excelled at.
As J.B. headed for the stern, he visualized the round, brown faces of the female whitecoats as they brought in the tainted food. So bright, so happy, so bubbly. Not smug or superior or dismissive. They were simply glad to be of use. As twisted as their work was, it was clear they loved it.
Once a day the companions were taken out of their cabin, individually weighed, measured with calipers and examined, this while Dr. Montejo took careful notes. Then he escorted them on their slow circuits around the top deck, keeping track of the number of turns they did and the elapsed time.
The head whitecoat seemed very pleased by the course of events, as well. There was always a hint of glee in his dark eyes, infuriating glee. J.B. had noted that he never perspired, either, no matter how hot the sun got.
Since they’d left Veracruz, J.B. hadn’t seen High Pile, the Matachìn commander, either. But there were always dreadlocked sailors on deck when he took his forced constitutional. They made comments as he baby-stepped past them. Unpleasant things from their tone of voice. And their laughter.
If he could have gotten hold of one of their gut-hook machetes, he would have given them something to laugh at. He would have split their filthy heads from crown to chin, and washed his hands in the jetting blood.
Five baby steps later, the gory fantasy had vanished. J.B. couldn’t hold it in his mind to further flesh it out. Two steps more and he couldn’t even remember it. As he staggered on, a brand-new thought popped into his head. How many miles had the black sloop covered so far?
The Armorer’s grasp of geographical detail outside Deathlands was skimpy at best. Traveling around the clock, he guessed they could have made somewhere between 150 and 200 miles a day. If he could have recalled the number of days they’d been at sea, he might have been able to frame a coherent answer—assuming, of course, he didn’t forget the question while he was struggling with the butt-simple multiplication.
Another few shuffling steps and he had indeed forgotten it.
A flurry of new questions occurred to him. How far south were they going? Were they headed to the ends of the Earth? Was there even such a place? Why would the pirates take them there?
There were no answers to those, either.
In a minute or so, the questions themselves disappeared.
J.B. found it strange and deeply unsettling that he couldn’t manage to be sad over Ryan’s presumed death. Not a single tear had he shed. It felt as though all his emotions had been ripped out, or buried under the paralyzing weight that filled his limbs and muddled his mind. He couldn’t grieve for the fates of the other companions, he couldn’t even grieve for himself. Only one thing kept him from being a complete zombie—he still had his fury, his outrage. Deep down, the heat of it, like embers of a fire that had burned out, remained. He clung to its familiar but fading warmth.
Doc and Jak had experienced the same, inexorable withdrawal from reality.
“I get the distinct impression that we are being fattened up, like cattle in a feed lot,” Doc had said in a brief, lucid moment between opiate-laced meals.
“We stop eating?” Jak had asked.
“We haven’t regained our full strength, yet,” the Victorian said. “We may have to wait until the ship reaches its destination to make our move.”
“What if this is our best and only shot at getting away?” J.B. had countered. “What if it only gets harder from here on?”
Doc had had no answer for that.
They couldn’t get any information out of the whitecoats. Their keepers wouldn’t respond to questions. Not even when Doc put them in Spanish. All they ever got back were toothy smiles.
The captives were being humored.
Nothing mattered, as long as the procedures went smoothly, as long as they ate their dinners and submitted to the daily examination. And the longer the voyage stretched on, the less anything mattered. Death would have almost been preferable to this limbo, this half existence. But J.B. didn’t want to buy the ranch so far from home. And he didn’t want to check out with chains around his wrists and ankles. He wanted to die with a blaster in his hand, having fired every round in the mag into his enemies’ guts.
Although J.B. and Doc had tried to pump the Fire Talker in the cabin next door for information, Daniel had never let slip anything of use, either. It was hard for J.B. to believe he didn’t know any more than they did about where they were going and why. Over the days and nights of confinement, the freezie’s through-the-wall ramblings had become more and more disjointed. He kept confusing the science fiction series he’d worked on before skydark with events in the current reality. He had begun to mix up the predark pulp publisher and staff with the Lords of Death.
Was he raving because of the opiates in his food?
Or because his mind had cracked under the strain like a raw egg?
Over and over, Daniel recapped t
he tedious plots of his novels. Even worse, he dramatized the pivotal scenes in the 250-title story arc using an array of irritatingly unconvincing voices.
Apparently this was something he could do while drugged.
He never tired of the activity.
And he seemed to delight in how crazy it made Jak.
There were dents in the sheet steel wall where the albino had pounded with his fists to try to end the monologues. At one point, Jak had tried to articulate to Doc and J.B. the reasons for his violent loathing. In his halting speech, he’d said, “Stink hole never shot blaster, never chilled face-to-face, piece of shit liar never shuts up.”
Which just about covered it, as far as J.B. was concerned.
As J.B. and his whitecoat escort rounded the black ship’s bow, he saw the tiniest dark sliver of coastline on the starboard horizon. It hadn’t been there before. One of the sailors let out a holler and pointed in that direction. Soon, all the pirates were yelling and pointing. A few moments later the deck banked sharply as the sloop heeled over, steering for the strip of land.
J.B. turned back to look at the helm and saw that High Pile was behind the wheel. The commander had decked himself out in full battle gear, his body armor oiled and gleaming, glittering masses of looted trinkets in his rat’s nest coiffure and wrapped in coils around the ankles of his boots. He had applied a fresh coat of mascara to his eyes, his long beard was braided into a half-dozen jutting pigtails, and he held a stub of a cigar clenched between his teeth.
Mebbe this is it, Dix thought. Finally, the end of the line.
Under a hammering sun, a knob end of land gradually slid into view, and upon it sat what appeared to be a large city, its extensive skyline backlit in hard silhouette. The low-lying panorama was dominated by a pair of enormous predark buildings, fifteen or sixteen stories high. They were bigger than anything he’d seen in Veracruz. Structures half as tall clustered around their flanks.
J.B. had to shield his eyes from the painful glare off the water, glare that was magnified by the lenses of his spectacles. When he glanced over at Dr. Montejo, he saw delight in the whitecoat’s face.
The closer they got to the shore, the less appealing the place looked to J.B. It wasn’t just the backlighting that made the buildings appear so dark.
Everything was green.
Dark, dark green.
Even the twin towers were shrouded with vegetation.
The jungle had reclaimed its turf.
MILDRED LET HERSELF be half dragged up the companionway by a dreadlocked pirate. If it was unbearably hot below the black sloop’s decks, it was even hotter above. As she and her odiferous escort stepped out into the air, the tropical sun’s rays scorched her bare arms and shoulders like a flame.
Pretending to be drugged was easy. To convince her captors, all she had to do was half close her eyes, hang her head, go semilimp, and shuffle her feet as she was towed along. Behind her, Krysty was pulling the same stupefied act. After the first twenty-four hours aboard ship, after eating three of the wonderful meals, Mildred had figured their food was being tampered with. Krysty’s stolen fork was confiscated that same night while they were unconscious. After that they’d been left to eat with their fingers. What they were experiencing wasn’t just exhaustion or the effects of long-term starvation: it was opiates.
Mildred decided that the whitecoats had to be sprinkling the drug in the delectable sauces instead of injecting it into the meat. It was the only way to assure the captives got a full dose. To test this hypothesis, she waited until the little brown women left the cabin to bring meals to the others, then she carefully washed off all the meat in the sink. She and Krysty ate it, and ditched the rest of the food down the drain. Her guess was right. The chicken, pork and beef didn’t soak up the drug from the sauce. In an hour or so, the feeling of stupor and dizziness completely vanished. Unfortunately, there was no way to communicate this discovery to the men.
J.B., Doc and Jak were already lined up on deck when she got there. They didn’t look well. And from the dilated state of their pupils, they weren’t faking it.
She and Krysty had tried to warn them about the food, but they couldn’t tell if their shouts had been heard.
As it turned out, the menfolk had figured it out for themselves.
“Grub is poisoned,” was the first thing J.B. said to her. His speech was badly slurred and he was having trouble standing. The second thing he said was “Ryan’s probably dead by now.”
That was likely true, as well.
Mildred felt a catch in her throat, an agonizing ache that spread down to her breastbone. Under the circumstances, grief was a luxury. It was also another form of shackle, an even more debilitating one when survival depended on a clear mind. She refused to give in to it. That’s what Ryan would have done. That’s the way he would have wanted it.
Doc and Jak were in no better shape than J.B. They had known the food was tainted and they’d eaten it anyway. Probably because they’d figured out they had to have it to regain their strength. Mildred was amazed that they hadn’t realized they could just wash it off and be safe. Maybe they discovered the problem too late, or maybe by then they were too drugged to reason it out. Maybe the whitecoats had kept better watch on them, making sure they ate it all. At least she and Krysty were drug-free.
Mildred scanned the green vista across the water ahead. She had a fair idea of how far they’d come. Because they weren’t doped up, she and Krysty had been able to keep track of the number of days they’d traveled and to estimate the average speed. Because the pirates thought she was drugged to the gills, or because they didn’t give a damn, they had been less careful about what they’d said in Mildred’s presence. She had overheard them mention a name that she knew. A possible, even a likely destination.
Colón.
Panama.
In her former life, before she had been cryogenically frozen, Mildred had never visited Colón City, but she knew a little about it, having closely followed the news coverage of the U. S. invasion and fall of the Panamanian military dictator, Manuel Noriega, in 1989. She knew Colón was situated at the Atlantic entrance to the Panama canal.
If the city had been taken back by the jungle, the worldfamous canal was nowhere to be seen.
As the black sloop neared the entrance to the bay, High Pile ordered his crew to drop sail and he started up the ship’s engines. It appeared the route to landfall was too tricky for wind power. Though broad, the bay had filled in on either side with dense stands of mangrove scrub, leaving a deep but narrow central channel. Cloudy, turquoise water lapped against a dark, impenetrable tangle of tree roots. The thin, overcast skies and the reflections off the jungle gave the air an oppressive, yellowish tinge.
A sickly place, Mildred reckoned, cooking at a slow simmer in the ninety-plus heat of midday. The atmosphere was sulfurous, thick with the smell of biological decay. Of swamp muck. Ahead, between the bow of the black ship and the overgrown ruin of a city, the beach was not sand, it was a flat of beige-colored, pestilential mud.
The city’s buildings, covered with greenery, reminded her of the Mayan temples in Guatemala she had vacation-toured before skydark. Enormous complexes, buried under mounds of earth and vegetation; every distant hilltop the tip of yet another lost temple. How many people had lived in Colón, the gateway to the Pacific, before the end of the world? She guessed a couple of hundred thousand.
Something truly catastrophic had happened here.
Something different than the tidal wave damage Veracruz had suffered.
In Veracruz, the surviving population had been large enough to keep the jungle beaten back, to maintain a semblance of the predark status quo. Whatever had happened in Colón, its impact had been much more devastating to infrastructure and to the human population. Mildred had to figure the canal was a likely target for a Soviet MIRV on hellday, but this disaster hadn’t been the direct result of a nuke strike. If it had, there would have been the remains of a crater, a dead zone filled
in with seawater. No buildings would have been left standing. Perhaps the all-out exchange of 2001 was over and done with before the Soviet ICBM aimed at the canal left its launch pad.
As she looked for the canal entrance, the first of the series of locks that raised and lowered ship traffic, and saw nothing but mangrove swamp, it dawned on her. The canal was gone. The locks were gone. Maybe the dams that held back the fresh water used to lift the ships over the isthmus were gone, too.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she recalled a number: fifty-two million. That was how many gallons of fresh water it had taken to move a ship from one end of the canal to the other. To supply the enormous quantity of water, great rivers had been dammed, vast man-made lakes had been created.
Mildred shivered, despite the heat, as she imagined the towering wall of water, water brown with a century’s worth of backed-up silt, rushing down the canal’s channel, scouring away everything in its path. A tightly focused laser beam of a disaster.
Just because this end of the canal hadn’t suffered a direct hit by a nuke, it didn’t mean the destruction wasn’t nuke-spawned. Chances were, the all-out exchange and the breaking of the dams were connected; chances were, they happened on the same day, at roughly the same time. The backbone of Central America was volcanic, Mildred knew, and it had a long history of violent earthquakes. The Soviet earth-shaker warheads launched against North America were designed to induce far-reaching geologic cataclysm.
Central America was a hair-trigger waiting for just the right tight-and-curly.
She looked around and saw no beached container ships rusting among the mangroves, and farther off the stern there was no breakwater to protect and mark the bay’s entrance. A lineup of cargo ships would have been anchored in the bay, off the canal entrance on the fateful day, waiting for their turn to cross the isthmus. As big as the tankers and freighters were, they would have been no match for the wave that came crashing down on them. To drain the hundreds of trillions of gallons of backed-up water would have taken a very long time. The torrent would have continued unabated for many hours, driving the wrecked ships far offshore to sink, disassembling the breakwater, boulder by boulder.
