by James Axler
The poor people of Colón had had no chance. There was nowhere to run, but up. A few of the lucky ones might have made it to safety in the top floors of the tallest buildings. The rest, caught unaware at street level, unable to understand what was happening, unable to react in time, would have been washed out to sea with everything else that wasn’t nailed down—and most of what was.
Ahead, the narrow ship channel was marked at intervals with tied-together clusters of floating, oil-stained, white plastic jugs fixed to the bottom with nylon rope. Closer to shore, two sailing ships were moored on the edge of the channel, anchored fore and aft to keep from drifting onto the flats. Their crews were nowhere to be seen. Farther on, in much shallower water, a half dozen small, open, fishing boats were tied to another claptrap buoy. There were no power vessels of any size, which made Mildred wonder if the Matachìn kept all their engine-powered ships farther north, closer to the primary sources of fuel. That made sense if fuel supplies were limited, and transport was difficult.
Beyond the fishing boats, she could see the uneven stumps of immense, concrete pier pilings, the pier decks having been ripped away.
Framing the nasty bay on three sides were low, heavily jungled hills. Had all this vegetation, had this complex ecosystem really survived a “nuclear winter”? she asked herself. A global deep-freeze that had supposedly lasted ten years?
Mildred had always had serious doubts on that subject—after all, who supposedly had been keeping track of the time and temperature, postnukeday? Was it some anonymous ass-scratcher living in a cave? Where were the readings taken? How? Over what span of years? As a scientist, Mildred knew precise definitions as well as precise measurements were vital to understanding natural phenomena. What was the ass-scratcher’s definition of “nuclear winter”? Did he-she even have one? Or was this just one more in a long line of Deathlands myths, contrived by idiots for idiots to pass the time while they cracked and ate each other’s nits?
If the presumed “nuclear winter” had been a globe-encompassing event, it couldn’t have begun and completely dissipated as quickly as a generation. That kind of rapid freezing and warming on a planetary scale simply wasn’t possible, short of a change in earth’s orbit. If a “nuclear winter” scenario had happened after Armageddon, it was most likely localized to the Northern Hemisphere, where the missile strikes and counterstrikes had landed, where the atmospheric dust clouds would have been the thickest; and if there had been increased glaciation, it hadn’t been of any consequence.
And that didn’t address the point that ten years of unusually cold, localized weather didn’t even qualify as a mini–ice age, let alone “nuclear winter.”
A short distance from the shoreline, half in, half out of the water, was the twisted base of an enormous, latticework steel tower. It jutted like the bloody skeleton of some prehistoric reptile. The other end of the ruined tower was submerged, buried under the pale mud. In between, Mildred could see the rusting framework, some two hundred feet of it, just under the murky surface.
The waterfront of Colón had been rebuilt after the disaster, albeit on a much less ambitious scale. The modern city had become a shantyville on stilts over the stinking tidal mud flats, a maze of whitewashed, single-story buildings connected to one another and to the solid ground inland by elevated wooden walkways on flimsy-looking, pecker-pole pilings. Beyond the peaks of the sheet metal roofs, on the other side of a narrow road cut, was a twenty-foot-high, solid wall of green leaves and branches.
At High Pile’s bellowed command, the pirate crew hopped to it, anchoring the black sloop securely fore and aft, within one hundred of the nearest shanty-on-stilts.
There were no fortifications in evidence. No gun emplacements, either. It seemed strange to Mildred that the Matachìn port sat undefended. Maybe it wasn’t a stronghold, after all. Or were all the potential threats so far away that defense wasn’t an issue?
Krysty shuffled up alongside Mildred, her red hair hanging lank around her shoulders. They didn’t look at each other; they certainly didn’t speak. They had decided not to talk in front of their captors. They didn’t want give away the fact that they were lucid. And perhaps get themselves forcibly injected with drugs. The whitecoats could have done that anyway, used hypodermics to dose them, but they seemed to want everything to be nice and friendly, all happy-face smiles, even when they were doing someone an injury.
The pirates lowered three large rowboats over the side. The companions were forced into one of them, then joined by a trio of Matachìn guards. High Pile, the whitecoats and more pirates got into the other boats, leaving the black ship with a skeleton crew.
At least the companions weren’t doing the rowing this time.
While they sat packed shoulder to shoulder on the stern thwarts, the pirates facing them amidships hauled back on the oars. The pirate lounging in the bow held a submachine gun balanced on his lap.
The sun flashed on the golden trinkets wound around their boot tops. When Mildred glanced down she saw a name etched on a dangling locket: Lupe. A delicate, heart pendant on a thin gold chain. There were other names, too, and different styles of bracelet and necklace. Trophies of pillage, of rape and murder, worn like badges of honor, like combat medals.
One of the rower-Matachìn caught her looking at his trinket collection. A lewd gleam in his eye, he puckered up and blew her an obscene kiss.
Animals, she thought.
Stinking animals.
Mildred wondered what had kept them in check on the journey south. After all, they had had access to the cabin she and Krysty shared. Drugged women in chains. That sounded made-to-order for these creeps. Their lust, she reasoned, had to have been controlled by fear. If not fear of the wrath of their commander, then fear of the wrath of the Lords of Death. Which, upon reflection, didn’t bode all that well for any of the captives. It probably meant some greater purpose—or far nastier end—awaited them.
The Matachìn beached the bows of the boats on the mud flats. Then Mildred and the others were hoisted out by the armpits by pirates on either side. The seas were warm as bathwater. And this was as close to a bath as the Matachìn got. There was no way the captives could have navigated the oozing muck with their ankles in chains. The pirates sank in up to their knees as they struggled to lug them to the lip of a slimy concrete ramp that led up to the walkway.
At High Pile’s signal, two of the Matachìn waded back out to the boats, pushed one off the mud, jumped in and started rowing for the ship.
A welcoming committee awaited the others on the platform above the ramp. If the five men were Matachìn, they had gone paramilitary. They wore jungle camouflage T-shirts and BDU pants. On shoulder slings they carried the same stubby little 9 mm submachine guns as the pirates. As the prisoners slowly ascended the ramp, little brown-faced kids peeked out at them through the glassless windows and doorless doorways of the shanties, then ducked back.
High Pile and Dr. Montejo approached one of the camouflage greeters, the one with the most radically sculpted face. He was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. To Mildred’s surprise, the commander and the whitecoat didn’t salute, or offer to shake hands or simply nod, they immediately prostrated themselves on the walkway, raising their butts in the air, pressing their noses into the rough boards.
Subservience in spades.
The man they genuflected to grunted something and the two rose.
When High Pile spoke to his superior, Mildred thought she caught a proper name, or maybe it was a title or rank: Nibor. Something like that. High Pile repeated it every six or seven words.
The sun, filtered through the mesh of the straw, cast a tiny checkerboard of light and dark across Nibor’s face. His head and eyebrows were shaved. The tops of his ears had been shaved, as well, cut into points, and the lobes excised entirely. Narrow seams of scar tissue marked his brown cheeks, running from under the centers of his lower eyelids to his jawline, dividing his face into three unequal sections. Golden artificial fangs on his lower j
aw curled out in front of his upper lip, the philtrum of which had been split like a dog’s, the fleshy drapes pulled back, so the sharpened points of his natural teeth could show. He wore a necklace of ivory-colored, human finger bones, separated from each other by strung, gold-filled human teeth.
Mildred knew extensive plastic surgery when she saw it. She had seen it on the governor-general of Veracruz, as well. Whoever had wielded the #15 scalpel was a highly skilled surgeon, with the artistic vision of a raving psychopath.
Was Nibor a priest or a warrior? Mildred wondered. Or perhaps he was a combination of both.? The uniform he and the others in the welcoming committee sported was suitable for action, not empty, mumbo-jumbo ceremony. The others all had shaved heads, but less extreme facial alterations. It occurred to her that the scarifications, like the height of the piled dreadlocks, might be symbols of rank—only permanent, until death. Was the quintet a military wing of the Lords of Death priesthood, or perhaps some specially tasked, elite guard unit?
A conversation ensued between High Pile, Montejo and Nibor. As it progressed, Mildred managed to get the general drift. The Matachìn commander first bragged to his superior about what his men had done in Tierra de la Muerte, how they had laid waste to Padre Island, and brought back these five most suitable subjects, which he was turning over to Nibor with the greatest respect. High Pile announced that he and his crew would remain in Colón to await the return of the prisoners. Whereupon he and they would ship back to their real job: pillaging and chilling.
Nibor nodded. His reply was difficult to understand because of the oral modifications, which tended to muffle and distort his speech, but to Mildred it sounded like he said, “In a month they will be back here.”
Dr. Montejo was proud of his work, too, and he butted in, pointing out his success in restoring the captives to full and robust health.
Instead of a pat on the back, he got a disinterested grunt from Nibor.
High Pile turned and gestured at his crew, then told the dog-faced man that he and his sailors had grown tired of banging the little brujas. And that he hoped the local whorehouse would give them some better variety.
Brujas? Mildred asked herself. Witches? Was High Pile talking about the little brown whitecoats?
The two women in white giggled and tittered behind their upraised hands, happy as clams that they rated a mention to the Big Man, even if it was in the form of a complaint about their job performance.
Leaving Mildred to wonder where in hell all three of them had been trained, how they’d been trained, and by whom. It appeared that in these climes the status symbol of the white lab coat had lost much of its objective, professional luster.
At least she knew that wherever they were being taken by Nibor the plan was for them to eventually be brought back to Colón, and then taken north again. Which meant they weren’t going to be chilled in the immediate future—not on purpose, anyway.
“¿Su enano, dondè esta?” Nibor said.
“Allà,” High Pile replied, pointing back at the water.
Out on the mud flat, the rowboat had returned from the ship bearing another passenger on the stern, this one swaddled, bagged head to foot in black mosquito netting. Though the passenger’s ankles weren’t manacled, the pirates carried him—or her—over the mud to the ramp.
It wasn’t until the shrouded one reached the top of the ramp that Mildred recognized who it was: the Fire Talker, Desipio. The mosquito netting was like a beekeeper’s suit, with sewn-in arms and legs. The reason for the protection was a puzzle she couldn’t immediately solve, or bring herself to care about. Obviously, the piece of shit had been transferred from the hold of the tug to the black sloop.
The pirates kept him at a distance from the other captives, and their bodies as a barrier between them. An extra precaution.
Doc, J.B. and Jak weren’t in any condition to do him serious harm, as much as they might have wanted to. As for Mildred, she held her own fury in check with the thought that at some point soon she would get her chance to pay back the bastard who’d betrayed them and gotten Ryan Cawdor chilled.
The dog-faced man waved for the Matachìn and their entourage to follow. Mildred and the companions were ushered along the walkways to dry land. Except for the curious children, the inhabitants of the little ville-on-stilts had apparently all taken cover, waiting for the potential Lords of Death storm to pass. The column walked along a deeply eroded dirt lane on the edge of old Colón. Most of the standing structures were rubblized, home to small, darting lizards. Much larger, striped iguanas slithered from sunning spots on concrete pads into the safety of the bush.
The modern city above the treetops had been eaten alive by jungle. The empty window frames of the high-rises had been invaded by clusters of green creepers, like scavenger worms boring through the eye sockets of skulls. The farther they moved from the water, the hotter it got, and bug song sawed from every branch and leaf. The rilled road soon gave way to a narrower, tree-shaded lane. The shacks on either side of the path had to be of more recent construction. No way could those ramshackle affairs have withstood the force of the flood, although some were thrown up on the ruins of the predark structures. Strangler vines wrapped around trunks and branches, their trumpetlike, bright yellow flowers gave off a dizzingly sweet perfume. Some of the tree branches were laden with fruit, as well. Papayas and guanabanas lay rotting on the ground. Black-and-white pigs too drained by the heat to gorge themselves lay panting on their sides in the shade at the sides of the road.
The land of plenty.
Mildred wondered what the population of Colón was now. A few hundred souls, maybe? A thousand at most? It was hard to say because there could have been dwellings off the lane, in clearings deeper in the jungle.
Ahead, peeking up over the treetops on the right, was a much bigger structure that had obviously ridden out, or more likely been missed by the wall of flood water. Two stories high, and easily 250 feet long, one side of its facade bordered the lane. It looked like an enormous Spanish hacienda from colonial times: white plaster perimeter, red-tiled roof, black wood trim.
As they got closer, where the concrete and plaster had fallen away, Mildred could see hugely thick brick walls underneath. At one time, shaded balconies along the second floor had overlooked the lane. They were long gone. All that remained were the jagged black remnants of their support posts. Steel shutters covered the second-story windows and balcony doors to keep out the heat—and presumably incoming bullets. There were holes in the roof where tiles had slipped away. The ground-floor windows facing the lane were massively barred.
Mildred noticed a pair of recent, rather crude additions to the corners of the roof: machine-gun posts, with their own palm-frond sunshades. Across the lane from the hacienda, the jungle branches had been reduced to white-tipped stubs.
Gut-hook machetes at work.
Mildred guessed she was looking at the Matachìn HQ.
They were led through the story-and-a-half-tall double wooden gate. Mildred immediately smelled fresh horseshit. Sure enough, in the far corner of the yard was a stable. The enclosed compound was bordered on four sides by the wings of the hacienda. To their right, in front of a palm-frond roofed patio, four horses were tied to a hitching post and two horse-drawn carts stood waiting. There were no gasoline or diesel-powered wags in sight.
The Matachìn, High Pile included, directed their attention to the shaded tables under the palm fronds, and the dozen or so brown women who lounged on the chairs and couches there. The pirates unleashed a predictable chorus of whistles and kissing sounds. The gaudy sluts grinned and waved for the men to join them, pointing at the full bottles of joy juice on the tabletops. A couple of them jerked down the necklines of their peasant blouses to expose black-tipped breasts.
This made the pirates very happy.
While High Pile and his crew hurried over to introduce themselves, the paramilitaries hustled Mildred and the companions into the back of one of the horse carts. Their chains wer
e looped through iron rings in the cart’s low rear and side walls. When they were secured, Nibor and one of his lackeys helped Daniel into the cart, as well. They put him forward, chaining his cuffs to the front wall, well out of the reach of his fellow passengers.
Daniel didn’t say anything.
Nor did any of the companions speak to him.
Over on the patio, the sluts were getting comfortable on the pirates’ laps, holding the bottles up so their new friends could drink their fill.
One of the paramilitaries climbed onto the driver’s seat of the companions’ cart. Wherever they were headed, the 9 mill subguns were not enough firepower. Nibor handed the cart driver a well-worn Soviet RPD—a 7.62 mm, 100-round, drum-fed, light machine gun. Mildred saw there was a mount for a bipod on the barrel right behind the front sight, but the bipod’s legs were missing—it looked as if the weapon had been customized with a hacksaw. The driver set the machine gun on the seat beside him, close to hand. Dog-face and the three others slung identical weapons across their backs, then mounted the saddled horses. Montejo and the little women climbed into a second, supply-loaded cart, and the doctor took the reins.
With a lurch, the two-cart, six-horse convoy set off across the courtyard and through the open gates. The slow movement caused air to flow over Mildred’s sweating body and face, but it did nothing to cool her off.
Mildred soon realized why they weren’t riding in wags, why there were no wags in evidence inside the compound. Wags never could have made it over the shambles of a road, which deteriorated even further as they put the hacienda behind them: broad, slick patches of exposed bedrock, potholes deep enough to bury a man. The jarring reality of a no-tech world was something she’d learned to expect from the hellscape. The fabled survival of progress in these latitudes was nothing but a charade.
