by James Axler
“Take them away,” Atapul X ordered Nibor as he turned back for the bleachers.
Mildred and the others were summarily hauled to their feet and quick-marched out the same gymnasium doors they’d entered, this time with all the whitecoats marching in front of them. The warrior-priests pushed them into a sally port, a hurricane-fenced corridor that had originally kept prisoners from wandering around the yard. Evening was closing in. The sky above the clearing was shot with salmon pink and turquoise. Mildred was very relieved to be out in the open air.
“That went well,” Doc said.
Behind them, Daniel Desipio had gone limp. Two of Nibor’s sec men were lugging him along by the armpits, dragging the toes of his boots in the dirt.
“Wherever he’s going, it doesn’t look like fun,” Krysty said.
The whitecoats veered off toward the more recent-looking structure. Unlike the prison block that loomed to their left, this building had windows and once it had plate-glass doors, which had been broken out and replaced with plywood scrap. Daniel and his bearers veered off, as well. One of the whitecoats held a door open, and the Fire Talker was dragged inside.
“Casa de la Navaja,” Nibor announced, having noticed their interest. He then indicated his disfigured face with a sweep of his hand, and obvious pride.
“What’d he say?” J.B. asked.
“Razor House,” Mildred translated. “That building’s called Razor House. It’s a reference taken from the ancient Mayan legends. In the Xibalban creation myths, it was supposedly filled with sentient knives that could fly. In this incarnation it’s the whitecoat surgical center.”
Dog-face indicated a doorway to their left, in the single-storey arm of the L-shaped prison block. “Casa de Frio,” he said.
“That would be Cold or Rattling House,” Mildred told the others. As they passed the doorway, she could hear the steady hum of generators. “Where they store the bioweap freezies, no doubt.”
A second separate structure looked like it had once been a maintenance shed. As they walked past, from inside came the sounds of snarling and growling.
“Casa de Balam,” Nibor said.
“Jaguar House,” Mildred translated.
“Since when do jaguars bark?” Krysty said.
“They’ve substituted wild dogs for the jaguars in the myth,” Mildred said. “It’s understandable. Jaguars are probably few and far between on this island.”
“What’s the point of all these ‘houses,’ anyway?” J.B. said.
“According to the legends,” Mildred replied, “they provided tests that would either kill or humiliate visitors to Xibalba. The goal was to outwit the test and survive—only to be confronted by the next test. And the next. They got worse as they went along.”
“Must have cut down on tourism,” Doc said.
“Xibalba was supposed to be Hell for regular folks,” Mildred said. “Whoever applied the myths to this place doesn’t have a clue what they were really about.”
Nibor opened a heavy, riveted-metal door in the windowless wall ahead of them. As the door swung back, Mildred could see the faint glow of electric lights. The bulbs throbbed in time with the generators. Then, out of the doorway, there came a rush of leathery wings just over their heads. All of the companions ducked reflexively.
“Don’t tell me,” J.B. said, “it’s Bat House.”
The prison’s interior was in no better shape than the outside. The corridor between the two-story-high tiers of cells was gritty, littered with refuse, mildewed and dank. The cells’ steel bars looked rusted, but they were two inches in diameter, still plenty thick enough to do the job.
All five companions were shoved into the same narrow, low-ceilinged cell. It only had four bunks. There were no mattresses, just metal bed frames suspended by chains eye-bolted into the concrete. There was a bucket for a toilet, and a bucket for water; they sat side by side. The toilet hadn’t been emptied in a while.
Across the corridor, in the cell opposite, another prisoner dozed on a top bunk in a sitting position, leaning with his back against the concrete wall. The sound of the cell door clanging shut didn’t wake him up. In the dim light it looked like his holed-out, yellow sweat-stained T-shirt had been fitted with a pair of shiny black epaulettes. Slurpy, sucking sounds were coming from the cell. Then the epaulettes fluttered their pointy wings and changed attack angles.
Not just any bats, as it turned out.
Blood from open wounds spilled down the prisoner’s chest.
Maybe he was already dead.
Bats in droves were shooting back and forth down the hallway, darting and diving between the bars, into the occupied cells. When their own cell was trespassed, Jak jumped up like a cat. He caught the flying vampire in his bare hands and then broke it in two like a fortune cookie.
A fortune cookie with blood and guts.
“We’d best take turns sleeping,” Doc said.
“Who the hell’s going to sleep?” Mildred said.
Chapter Twenty
Ryan gave up trying to sleep. It wasn’t the snoring of Tom and Chucho that kept him awake. It wasn’t the stink of the Matachìn commander tied to a chair five feet away. It wasn’t the eight dead men he was sharing the room with. He was thinking about his friends, about what they had to be suffering, about what kind of a lead their captors had, and he was chomping at the bit to be off after them.
But outside the Panama City yacht club it was still pitch-dark. There was no way to pick up the pursuit before dawn. Not across more than a couple hundred miles of unfamiliar waters in an unfamiliar ship.
The previous evening the four of them, Tom, Chucho, Casacampo and Ryan had arrived on horseback; this after three full days in the saddle. Riding along the city’s deserted, bay-front avenue, on the other side of the harbor they had seen the boats tied up off the old yacht club.
They had also seen the ancient plague warning signs along the road.
Both Tom and Ryan had demanded that Casacampo tell them the story of what happened. The commander obliged, and Chucho did the translating as they rounded the shore of the bay. Casacampo was wearing pants, and had been since the first night in Colón. Chucho had relented on the no-clothes issue, but it wasn’t because he felt sympathy for the bastard. He just didn’t want him to get saddle sores on his bare ass and be unable to walk, which would have slowed them.
The commander had assured them there was no plague anymore. But there were no people left in the city, either. They had all been killed. He said it had happened thirty years before he was born.
“The Matachìn did it?” Tom had asked.
“I only know what I’ve been told since I was a little boy,” Casacampo replied. “Way back when, Panama City was prime for the picking. Richer than Veracruz or any of the cities on the Atlantic. When the Matachìn attempted to take over the city there was concerted resistance. The people fought back hard when pirates attacked and managed to drive them off the beach. Afterward the people here realized the threat was not going to go away, that the enemy would keep coming back, so they organized an assault force to root them out and destroy them. Many ships, many guns, many fighters. They were about to send their fleet north to attack Xibalba and kill the Matachìn down to the last man. But the Matachìn got wind of their plan and struck first.”
Ryan had gestured at the vast city overwhelmed by jungle, groves of mango trees growing up through the asphalt, skyscrapers draped in greenery. “So what went wrong?” he asked.
“As it turned out the job was much easier than the Lords of Death thought,” Casacampo said. “They sent in too many of their enanos. They didn’t know how many they’d need to bring a city of this size to its knees. And once the disease carriers were released and the plague started to spread, they couldn’t stop it. It burned like wildfire through every neighborhood and out into the countryside, too. In two weeks almost everyone in the city was dead. The streets were heaped with unburied bodies. The houses and apartments were full of them. Those who didn�
��t die from the plague killed themselves in despair. Many of them jumped out of the skyscrapers.
“Only in the last ten years have we started to explore the edges of the city. There is much booty inside. And not enough Matachìn manpower to carry it out, or even to do a thorough search. Cutting back the jungle after all these years, and keeping it cut back would take ten thousand slaves, maybe more.”
Ryan rose to his feet, stepped over the sprawled bodies of the warrior-priests and walked to the picture window. He could just make out the broad, glassy bay in the starlight. The four of them had spent two nights under even worse conditions in the pirates’ hillside bunkers as they worked their way across the isthmus. As the evenings approached, he and Tom had noticed a change in Chucho and Casacampo’s demeanor. A nervousness gripped them both.
An urgency.
When Ryan had remarked on it, Chucho said, “As long as we ride quickly and reach the shelter before nightfall, there will be no problems. The jungle is very thick and the road is narrow. Many bad things come out after dark.”
“You mean, animals?” Tom said. “Or men?”
“No one knows what they are,” Chucho replied. “Things happen, though. People disappear along this trail without a trace. Entire mule trains just vanish. The forest is too thick to try to track them. It isn’t like it used to be.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan said.
“It is much more dangerous in these parts than it was before nukeday. There are things here now that didn’t used to be here. No one knows why. No one knows where they came from. No one has ever seen them and lived to tell about it. These things do not show themselves until it is too late.”
Ryan had seen nothing and heard nothing as dusk gathered around them, but he respected Chucho’s word. Even though he had wanted to push on, riding into the night to gain more ground on the companions, he hadn’t press the issue. Before dark, they were bolted in behind the bunker doors.
Taking the yacht club from the warrior-priests had been less of a challenge than the three-day ride. When push came to shove, and when Chucho was doing the pushing, Casacampo cared more about living than he cared about his fellow Matachìn. He didn’t like it, but he went along with it.
After dark, they had forced High Pile, now Low Pile, to pound on the clubhouse door with his fists and call out to the men inside, demanding shelter.
The bad things out at night didn’t knock.
And they didn’t ask for help.
When the door opened, Ryan, Tom and Chucho had pushed the commander through it in front of them.
The room beyond was a lounge of sorts. It was furnished with low tables, couches, armchairs, all lit by three white gas lanterns. There was a full bar along the back wall. Two Matachìn had come to answer the knock on the door, both carrying semi-auto handguns. Casacampo’s flying entrance knocked them aside and off balance. Before they could recover, Ryan rammed the muzzle of his silenced H&K subgun into the chest of the man on the right, and fired a triburst straight into his heart. The blast of lead sent the pirate flying backward. He crashed onto his butt, then went spread-eagle on the floor.
Chucho likewise dispatched the man on the left, blowing him off his feet with nine millis, blowing chunks out of the middle of his back.
The other pirates were in the middle of a card game, drinking white liquor from quart bottles, smoking cigars. Their weapons were out of easy reach.
They were caught dead in the water.
And from the looks on their faces, they knew it.
Casacampo had hit the deck in front of Ryan as he, Tom and Chucho had all cut loose with their submachine guns. Bullets stitched across the couches and chairs, across the heads and chests of the seated bodies. The Matachìn died where they sat, and in their death throes they kicked over the table, the loose cards fluttered down along with tufts of couch stuffing, and the game’s jackpot, which was consisted of a pile of gold teeth, skittered across the tile floor.
One of the pirates somehow managed to avoid being hit and vaulted off the end of the couch. He scrambled on all fours behind it, trying desperately to reach the bar and room’s rear doorway. Tom and Ryan shifted their aim points to take him out.
“Don’t shoot him!” Chucho had cried. Then he crossed the room in a blur. He cut off the man’s retreat, and nipped any further resistance in the bud by pressing his red-hot gun muzzle against the man’s shaved skull.
When the Matachìn looked up and saw the eye patch and the long hair, his jaw dropped open. “Are you really him?” he moaned. “Are you really Chucho?”
“They know your legend down here, too?” Tom had said, obviously impressed.
“Wherever these bastards are, I give them nightmares.”
Ryan had noted the surgical alterations on the new prisoner’s face. Shiny scalloped weals of scar tissue divided both his cheeks. The scars were too precise, too complex, and too symmetrical to be the result of an accident or combat. Some of the dead men had similar markings. Minor league Fright Masks. Perhaps if they were really, really bad they got the full treatment.
As Casacampo slowly got to his feet, Tom had asked him whether this was the extent of the garrison in Panama City.
The commander grimaced at the bodies that littered the couch and the floor. Then he said, “There are only ghosts here. This is all the garrison that’s needed.”
They had made Casacampo and the other prisoner drag the corpses out of the way. There was no choice; they had to spend the night. They needed daylight to continue the chase.
Unable to sleep, and not wanting to disturb Tom or Chucho, Ryan turned away from the window. He picked up a lantern and poked around the rest of the yacht club. In a back room closet, he discovered five Soviet RPD light machine guns and extra drum mags of 7.62 mm rounds. He field-stripped and checked the weapons and found them to be well oiled and in shooting shape. He had them lined up and ready by the front door when, just before dawn, Tom woke up.
“Slept like the dead,” the trader said as he stretched. Then he looked over at the heap in the corner and corrected himself. “Well, on second thought, maybe not. Couch sure beats a horse blanket on the ground, though.”
After waking Chucho, Casacampo and the prisoner, they lugged the backpacks of C-4 and detonators, their submachine guns, and the RPDs and ammo outside. Dawn was just breaking behind them; in front of them, the pirates’ commandeered navy sat peacefully at anchor.
“We need better than a five-hundred-mile range,” Tom said. “There may not be any way to refuel once we get there. We have to be able to make it back on whatever’s in the tanks.”
Then he made the scarred Matachìn point out the boat with the most fuel on board and the most range. Without hesitation, the prisoner indicated a yellowing, forty-five-foot Hatteras with flybridge.
They loaded a rowboat tied to the yacht club dock and made Casacampo and the prisoner row them over to the stern of the sportfisher. Tom boarded ship first. He scampered up the stainless-steel ladder aft of the main cabin, and cranked over the engines using the flybridge auxiliary controls. The diesels roared to life, and a huge plume of black smoke erupted from the exhausts. After a little feathering of the throttles the smoke belching aft turned white, then became invisible.
“Oh, yeah!” he shouted from the bridge. “This will do just fine.”
Ryan climbed aboard and helped Casacampo through the transom gate. “On your belly on the deck,” he told him, pointing. After the commander got the meaning and complied, Chucho started passing up the guns and explosives.
Tom let the engines idle while he descended the flybridge, ran for the bow and started winching up the anchor.
When all the matériel was transferred from the rowboat, Ryan looked at the prisoner at the oars, then at Chucho. “What about him?” he said. “Are you going to shoot him, or should I?”
“What’s he going to do here by himself?” Chucho said. “Besides, someone has to live to tell the tale, right?”
Ryan shrugged. H
e didn’t care one way or another. “Swim, you lucky asshole,” he told the Matachìn.
The pirate gave him a blank, helpless look.
When Chucho repeated the order in Spanish, the man’s face brightened. Without a word, he dived over the side and started stroking hard for shore.
After shifting the guns and C-4 to the salon, they tied Casacampo securely to the stern scupper, then joined Tom up on the flybridge.
“If we follow the coastline, we can’t miss Coiba,” Tom told them. “It’s eight or nine hours away, depending on how much speed I can squeeze out of this boat.”
The trader pushed down the twin throttles and the Hatteras responded, surging forward, splitting the mirror surface of the bay.
The sun was only half an hour up and it already was getting hot.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dressed in a pale blue, paper hospital gown Daniel Desipio sat manacled to a wheelchair in the hallway outside the office of Dr. Dolan Yorte, awaiting a surgical procedure he was all too familiar with.
If Daniel could’ve touched the floor with his tiptoes, he would’ve tried to toe-tap the wheelchair out of the building. If he could’ve reached his wrists with his teeth, he would have tried to gnaw through them. But due to the head and ankle restraints, he could do neither, so he was forced to simply sit and wait for the horrible inevitable.
The whitecoat building had been added to the prison after the secret deal was struck for use of the site and the convicts as guinea pigs. The cost came out of the black box budget of Project Persephone. Construction materials and laboratory equipment had been choppered in from a U.S. Army base on the mainland, and they’d been assembled by a company of Army engineers. Over a century of hard use, the original white acrylic tiles had turned dingy yellow, and here and there had curled up from the subfloor like oversize tortilla chips. There were rust stains on the acoustic drop ceiling, and deep scrape marks along the white-enameled walls where countless gurneys had grazed them.
