by James Axler
Nibor and his crew ignored them in return.
With three warrior-priests on point, followed by the companions, the whitecoats, Daniel and a two-man rear guard, they followed the sliver of land to the edge of the forest, then ducked under the rain-forest canopy.
It was smotheringly hot in the deep shade, like a bake oven. The trail was narrow and winding, they had to walk single file. Visibility was no more than ten feet ahead. The jungle off the trail was so thick that escape to either side was impossible. There was nowhere to run.
Dog-face and his crew immediately unsheathed their machetes.
Snakes, Mildred knew, were dispatched with machetes more easily than machine guns, especially in this kind of close quarter.
Even if there weren’t any muties lurking in the deep shadows, there were a thousand other ways to die in this place, all of them excruciating. From the way the warrior-priests clutched their weapons, they felt ambush or attack was likely at any moment.
After they had trekked in about two miles, up and down the sides of steep ravines, waded shallow creeks, and were drenched in sweat, Nibor stopped the advance with a hand signal. The jungle sounds that had surrounded them for more than an hour—the bellows of the howler monkeys and the screeches of the toucans and macaws—had gone suddenly silent. He listened for a moment, then announced to all, “Los perros vienen.”
The dogs are coming.
What dogs? Mildred thought.
The news sent the whitecoat women into a wide-eyed panic. They clutched each other’s hands and hung on for dear life. For his part, Dr. Montejo looked like he was about to swallow his own tongue.
A minute later Mildred heard the distant baying. Dogs, indeed. Dogs, aplenty.
The warrior-priests in the lead took off running; the pair at the rear drove the middle of the file onward, shouting and cursing to try to make them go faster.
Another two hundred yards up the path, and they had to hop over and around body parts strewed along thirty yards of trail. Clods of meat sprouted bristly tufts of hair. Uncoiled gray intestines festooned the low branches. Bloody shattered bones lay everywhere. To Mildred, it looked like the remains of a boar or wild pig, recently torn to shreds, dismembered, gutted and left there to rot.
Farther on, the decapitated head lay on its cheek at the edge of the trail, the head of a huge boar, with up-curving yellow tusks the size of Bowie knives. Anything that could rip apart something of that size was big trouble, even with machine guns.
The baying had grown louder and louder. It was coming at them from all sides now. Encirclement, and the horror that entailed, was clearly a possibility. And the column was losing ground to the pursuit, its speed slowed by the captives and their ankle manacles, but there was no time to stop to remove them.
Nibor quickly took measure of the problem and in a stunning bit of command-decision nastiness, he whipped his machine gun around on its shoulder sling and fired a single round, shooting one of his own men through the thigh. The wounded man let out a yelp and dropped to the ground, clutching his leg as he writhed in pain. They ran on, leaving him behind to occupy and slow the dog pack. He had the misfortune of being the least valuable member of the group, therefore the obvious choice for sacrifice.
A few minutes later awful sounds erupted from behind them, snarling, barking, shrill screams all mixed together. It sounded like a hundred animals had descended on the helpless prey.
Nibor’s act of betrayal had bought them a little time, just enough time as it turned out.
The trail ended at the old prison gates and a perimeter of rusting hurricane fence topped by razor wire. On the far side of the entrance, the rain-forest canopy had been cleared to the bare ground in an acres-wide circle. Sunlight streamed in, unfiltered.
Mildred had visited the Mayan ruins at Palenque and Tikal, and she had always imagined Xibalba as being something architecturally similar—steep-sided, white-limestone pyramids with unbroken rows of stone steps, and broad, cobblestone thoroughfares to accommodate religious festivals and parades. Massive sculpted stone faces and elaborate hieroglyphs for decoration, maybe a road of crushed white rock or shell leading in. This Xibalba was none of those.
Beyond the gates, in the center of the expanse of flat ground, was a densely packed complex of one-and two-story, windowless concrete buildings—modern, purely functional buildings. The site seemed to be unchanged from what it had been more than a century ago: it still looked like a maximum security prison. At one time the concrete had probably been painted a warm gold, now that color could barely be seen between the streaks of black mildew that striped all the walls. One of the low buildings looked newer; at least it was slightly more beige than mildewed.
Protecting the cluster of prison buildings was a second, razor wire–topped hurricane fence. It formed a twelve-foot-high hexagon around the compound, and at each of the six points there was a twenty-foot-tall guard tower with a spotlight. From where Mildred stood it didn’t appear that any of the towers were manned.
The warrior-priests shut and bolted the entry gates behind them, then urged them on, toward Xibalba proper.
Mildred could make out the hum of diesel-powered generators as they approached the second, much smaller gate. Between the barrier fence and the mildewed buildings there were about two hundred people. Some were performing menial tasks—tending gardens or animals, moving materials in wheelbarrows, digging ditches, and the like—but most were just milling around aimlessly. It reminded Mildred of a squalid Third World farmer’s market, or perhaps a Renaissance Fair in hell.
Greasy smoke from a row of roasting meats wafted over them. The skinned and gutted carcasses of some very large animals were being turned on spits over beds of heaped coals. Crocodile? Deer? Wild boar? Brown women naked to the waist basted the crisping haunches with rag mops. To Mildred, the joy on their faces seemed excessive and patently false—as in look extrahappy or die extrahorribly.
Then she realized with a shock that the broad grins they wore had been surgically installed, the muscles of their cheeks trimmed and then pinned to bone, the corners of their mouths permanently upturned with the tip of a scalpel.
Nibor led them toward a two-story building with a single row of narrow, wire-glassed windows just below the edge of the roof. To reach the structure they had to run a gauntlet of perpetually smiling supplicants lined up on either side of the path. Some of them were plastic surgery catastrophes, their faces and bodies horribly mutilated. Attempts to join plastic, metal and bone had gone awry, and massive infection had resulted.
So much pus, so much happiness.
What were they lined up for? Mildred asked herself. Not food, surely; food was everywhere and apparently free for the taking. Not clothing because they had clothes, and it was too hot to wear much of it, anyway. For payment of some kind? For some special entertainment? Neither of those seemed likely, either. Then the truth struck Mildred: these grinning bootlickers and insignificant demons were waiting patiently for audiences with the Lords of Death.
Mildred had a sudden, and under the circumstances, jarringly incongruous flashback. The closed double doors that loomed in front of them reminded her of high school gym class.
Nibor and the warrior-priests ushered the chained companions into the old prison’s basketball stadium.
This is their Ball Court? Mildred thought. She didn’t know whether to laugh out loud or scream foul. The details of her reading on the ancient Maya came back to her in a rush. A central feature of the myths of Xibalba was how much the Lords of Death loved their ball game, which they played with a razor-studded ball and a horizontal, stone hoop. The basketball backboards from the Noriega days were long gone, but Mildred could still make out the remnants of the free throw line on the concrete floor.
Across the court, in the top two rows of the bleachers, the Lords of Death awaited. Mildred did a quick count. There were thirty-six of them. Three times as many as there should have been. They sat as still as statues, in full head masks. The mask
s were garishly painted; they had the same stylized animal maws, pop-eyes and lolling tongues as the papier-mâché heads on sticks in Veracruz. Mildred was too far away to see eyes glittering behind the eyeholes. The Lords wore loose, flowing robes and sandals, like pharoahs or Roman senators. She couldn’t recognize any of the masks from the banners and models she’d seen in Mexico; she’d been too distracted at the time to take proper note.
Stationed along the narrow end of the court to her left were at least fifty more of the jungle-camouflaged paramilitaries. The sec men for the Lords of Death all had shaved heads; most were ritually scarred like Dog-face. They carried light automatic weapons, the same stubby, 9 mm submachine guns as their Matachìn brethren. Their position gave them clear firing lanes down the length of the court. If there was trouble in Xibalba, they could sweep it away in an instant with sustained bursts of autofire.
Mildred noted the chest-high clusters of bullet holes in the concrete of the opposite wall. It looked like a firing squad backstop.
The only game played on this court was stand-still-while-I-shoot-you.
Dr. Montejo and his assistants hurried over to greet the six other whitecoats gathered at the foot of the bleachers. One of the men, much younger and shorter than Montejo, with sweeping wings of black hair parted in the middle, shoved a stiffened finger in his face as he angrily berated him. Mildred couldn’t hear what was being said, but the younger man appeared to be Montejo’s superior and he was most agitated. As the wild-eyed young whitecoat took Montejo to task, he swept the plaits of hair out of his eyes with both hands. This was a gesture he repeated every few seconds, a nervous tic to be sure.
Then a voice boomed down on the court from above. Because of the echoes in the cavernous room it was impossible to tell which, if any, of the thirty-six seated Lords had spoken.
The voice itself sounded very strange to Mildred. Not muffled like Nibor because of bizarre facial surgery, but almost electronic, à la Stephen Hawking. The stilted absence of inflexion seemed surprising for a native speaker of Spanish.
One of Nibor’s paramilitaries grabbed hold of the back of Mildred’s neck and forced her to kneel on the floor and genuflect.
Then everyone in the room, save the sec men at the far end, were on knees, palms and noses.
For Mildred the sense of what had been said finally sank in.
Worship and tremble! I am Atapul the Tenth! First among the Lords of Death!
Nose pressed to the concrete, Mildred managed to turn her head and steal a peek as one of the masked figures, presumably the speaker, slowly stood. The rest of the Lords sat there like mannequins.
The mask worn by Atapul X was the stylized head of a jaguar, painted black with a headdress of a fan of red snakes, all poised to strike. The cat face had great long fangs and a lolling purple tongue. Even with the outsize mask on his head, Atapul X appeared to be an impressively wide-shouldered specimen. Mildred could see he was wearing some kind of tight-fitting, black body suit under his gold-trimmed white robes. The cuffs of the body suit came down to his massive wrists and down to his even more massive ankles.
The chief Lord of Death wore heavy rings on every finger and both thumbs. They were silver or stainless steel, and the centers of each were adorned not with gemstones, but with substantial, two-inch-long, steel points—miniature broadhead arrow tips. Together they made up a particularly wicked set of brass knuckles. With a straight punch or a raking slash, they could cut to the bone. Atapul X also had what looked like shiny, black-painted fingernails, and they were a half inch long and cut into sharp points. An odd and unsettling affectation, Mildred thought.
The bleacher seats creaked and groaned as Atapul X used them as steps to descend to the court floor. He was not a lightweight, by any means. On a leather thong around his right wrist, he carried a fearsome weapon. It was shaped like an oversize machete—heavy-bladed, single-edged, and thirty inches long. In the hands of a large, athletic person such a cleaver could make a head fly off a neck or an arm jump clear of a shoulder joint in one swipe.
The rows of unmoving, grotesquely masked Lords above, and this one lumbering down the bleachers like a bear in a Halloween suit was something out of a Grade-B horror movie.
The bear stopped in front of Nibor.
Dog-face immediately began to rattle off a list of the recent military successes in Tierra de la Muerte. And then he waxed poetic about the prospects for more victories, and the ease and speed with which they would come.
“This is all you brought me?” Atapul X demanded of the kneeling man, gesturing at the nose-down companions. “Five will not be nearly enough.”
Again because of that almost computer-sim voice, the Spanish took Mildred a moment or two to puzzle out.
Nibor replied with his eyes closed and his breath fogging the concrete. He said that it was all his fault and begged for Atapul’s mercy.
Mildred was surprised that Dog-face didn’t try to pass the buck to Casacampo. But maybe he knew bringing up the name would only increase Atapul X’s wrath, since the Matachìn commander wasn’t there to be punished in the flesh.
The chief Lord of Death ignored his pleas and advanced out onto the middle of the ball court, stopping to loom over the prostrated and be-netted Daniel Desipio.
“Don’t worry, you will have more brothers and sisters soon,” Atapul X told the cowering freezie. “Dr. Yorte will see to that.”
Daniel had to have understood the stilted Spanish because he muttered a baleful, “Oh, please no…”
“Creature, it is your privilege to supply the Lords of Death with what we demand,” Atapul X said. “Your diseased bones will make the weapons to bring this world to its knees, and in return for your servitude, we will feed and clothe you and let you live.”
The other Lords hissed down from the bleachers, hissed through the mouth holes in their masks. Not in disapproval; apparently the noise was their way of applauding. None of them moved so Mildred still couldn’t tell which of the figures were real, and which were just dummies.
When Atapul X turned in her direction, she quickly shifted her gaze to the floor under her nose. She had a bad feeling in her gut. By “brothers and sisters” did Atapul X mean this Dr. Yorte was going to thaw out more carriers from the cryo tanks? Or did he mean Dr. Yorte was going to make some more carriers, using Daniel’s donor marrow?
Mildred was having trouble swallowing the whole thawing business. It was chock full of logical problems, and the timeline didn’t make any sense, either. Successful thawing from cryogenesis was a complicated procedure even when automated because there were so many variables to monitor and compensate for. Relative tissue densities. Differential trehalose absorption—trehalose was the natural sugar that kept the internal components of living cells from freezing solid and cell walls from being ruptured by expanding ice—and variable antifreeze concentrations in organs and bones. Critical hydration and nutrient loss to specific tissues during the stresses of reanimation. The list went on and on. The convicts who first took over the prison were likely uneducated and mentally ill, if not completely deranged. How could they figure out how to unfreeze the carriers?
Furthermore, how could the eighth generation of offspring of the convicted murderers figure it out? Long before the Fire Talker was revived there were no whitecoats left to demonstrate or oversee the procedure. The convicts could have been trained by whitecoats from Day One and the training then passed down through the years, but for that to have happened, the Coiba prisoners would have had to anticipate that circumstances would demand deployment of the bioweapon at some point in the future. It was hard to believe that the convicts could have had that kind of foresight, or that amount of patience. Or the willingness to tempt fate, having seen firsthand what the whitecoats’ “failures” had suffered. Yet the necessary information and skills had been transferred or Daniel would never have been revived.
According to the Fire Talker, when he woke up the Atapuls were already in situ here, and had been for more than
a century. He had accepted what he was told, that the Lords of Death were part of the bloodline of the original convicts, and that the pirates had turned themselves into gods using enanos as their instruments.
There was no way of testing either of those hypotheses.
The total annihilation of the population of Panama City, which ran counter to Matachìn self-interest, seemed to reflect unfamiliarity with the weaponized disease. Apparently the Atapuls had no idea how deadly the plague was until they used it the first time.
And then there was the hellhole factor.
The Lords of Death and their groveling subjects all seemed blind or oblivious to the squalor they inhabited. It was like they were living in a dreamworld far, far from this wretched place. Xibalba was the seat of the Lords’ authority and their supposed spiritual power, but it was a shit pit.
The more Mildred considered all this, the more puzzling it became.
Then Atapul X stepped up right beside her and every other thought vanished from her mind. The chief Lord gave off a distinctly unpleasant odor. It was fusty and sour. It reminded her of something she couldn’t quite place, but she found the vague memory disturbing, nonetheless. The toes sticking out of the sandals were webbed, and the nails, crescent moons of ebony, looked like talons. Were they the product of plastic surgery? Some kind of synthetic implants?
Then Atapul X touched the bare back of her neck and she felt the points of those thick black fingernails drag across her skin.
Despite herself, Mildred shuddered, squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her nose into the concrete. She, who had traveled through time, who had already died once, who had shot and stabbed her way across a ruined continent, hadn’t been this terrified since she was a little girl.
It was more than just the smell, the sight, the touch of this creature. Mildred sensed there was no humanity there. No semblance of humanity. Human evil had its own limits, its comprehensible limits. Like every other homo sapien, Mildred could envision the range of harm that could be done to other people; like everyone else she could imagine doing most of it, herself, even if she never intended to and never would. This creature was not limited by those natural boundaries. Whatever boundaries Atapul X had, if he had any, they were inscrutable.
