Dark Resurrection

by James Axler

“Think it’s bullshit?” Ryan said.

  “He’s too scared to lie to us,” Chucho replied. “If he’s looking to make his move, it wouldn’t be something this easy to see through.”

  “I’ll tell Tom,” Ryan said, then he started up the flybridge ladder.

  The north side of the island was in the wind’s lee, and because of that it was a good ten degrees hotter. The coastline along the point was made up of cliffs of volcanic rock. They looked like piles of giant, ossified black turds, segmented, some with twisty-twirly tops. The walls of lava soaked up the sun’s heat and radiated it back like a bake oven.

  Tom negotiated the passage between the tip of the natural breakwater and the head of land. Inside the cove the water was pale turquoise and very clear. Ryan could see the white, sandy bottom fifty feet down.

  Casacampo made a comment from the stern.

  “He says in the olden days escaped prisoners sometimes got this far,” Chucho said. “Then they tried to swim or raft across the water to the mainland. There were huge sharks waiting for them. He says the prison guards used to watch from cliffs with binoculars and make bets on which convict the sharks would eat first.”

  After the Hatteras was anchored, they launched the ship’s dinghy. Tom and Ryan waded ashore carrying twenty-five pounds of C-4 each, in pre-rigged, one-pound chunks, plus two loaded RPDs and a pair of H&K MP-5 SD-1s and machetes. Chucho carried a silenced submachine gun, a backpack with extra drum mags for the Soviet machine guns and a machete. Casacampo had all their canteens over his shoulder; Chucho held him with a leash around his neck. His hands were bound at the wrists in front of him.

  At the foot of the cliff, white sand met black rock. There was more than one cave entrance. It was impossible to tell which were dead-end tunnels.

  “Which one is it?” Ryan asked Casacampo.

  Even though the question was in English, Low Pile understood it. He pointed at a vertical gash in the bedrock.

  After putting on their headlamps, they entered the cave, which reeked of rotting seaweed and bat shit. The sand floor quickly gave way to rock as the cavern up-angled. Runoff from the forest above had cut the steep-sided crevice down to the sea.

  The confined space, the fact that they were using headlamps, would make for a prime ambush, Ryan knew. They’d never know what hit them.

  “Keep the pirate close,” he reminded Chucho.

  They climbed steadily up through the pitch-darkness with silenced weapons at the ready. After a short distance the cave widened into a low-ceilinged gallery and the floor angle flattened.

  There was a different odor. A carrion odor.

  Then Ryan’s headlamp reflected in pair of eyes. Lots of eyes, low to the ground.

  Then the growling started.

  Three headlamps swept over the crouching forms.

  “Nice doggies,” Tom said hopefully.

  Yeah, right, Ryan thought, gripping his H&K. The dogs looked wet to the skin. They were big, rangy animals, 70 to 120 pounds. They were slathering mad. And they had just cause. Their turf had been invaded by strangers.

  Edible strangers.

  A particularly large specimen rose from its haunches and edged toward them, low to the floor, every muscle tensed. Its body language said attack was imminent. Behind it, a dozen pairs of red eyes followed.

  Ryan let the H&K fall to lanyard around his neck. He reached for the butt of the RPD and swung it around on its sling. As he brought the muzzle to bear, the lead dog charged them and the others followed suit. Tom cut loose with his submachine gun, but the silenced burst of 9 mm rounds didn’t even slow the animal down.

  Not enough knockdown power.

  The noise didn’t matter. Ryan had to use the RPD or be torn apart. He focused on the center of the pack, firing from the hip. The MG roared in the confined space. It was so loud that it buried the sounds of bullets slapping flesh. In his headlamp’s glare Ryan saw explosions of gore and slobber, and bright sparks as ricochets zinged off the cave’s floor and walls.

  The meat-grinder effect of all that compressed firepower aerosolized flesh and bone. Ryan fired fifty or sixty rounds, filling the cavern with a haze of gunsmoke.

  After the haze lifted, Tom pointed over at the cave wall. “Lookee there,” he said. “We got one more and she’s nursing her pups. They don’t even have their eyes open yet.”

  “Mebbe we’re gonna have to deal with her on the way out,” Tom said. “Mebbe we should just chill them all now.”

  “Go ahead, be my guest,” Chucho said.

  Tom shook his head, making the light from his headlamp dance across the wall. “Bitch with puppies, that’s bad juju.”

  “They’re feral dogs,” Ryan said. “Just leave them be. They can eat any Matachìn we don’t manage to chill.”

  “Perros locos,” Chucho said. “There are many more. They run in much bigger packs than this. Pray they don’t find us before we’re done here.”

  Ryan walked past the carnage he’d created. Nukin’ hell, he thought, those were some big-ass dogs. The bigger ones survived because they were strong enough to pull down deer and boar. Damned hard for a dog to catch a howler monkey or a macaw. That’s what Mildred called natural selection.

  The cave exit opened onto a jungle trail. It was very hot under the canopy and dark, but not dark enough to need the headlamps.

  “How far is it?” Tom asked Casacampo in Spanish.

  The answer was six miles.

  A ways to hump in 100-degree heat and humidity.

  The trail looked like it had been made by game. It was less than three feet wide and weaved back and forth around the bases of the massive trees.

  “Too tight quarters for blasters,” Ryan said, shoulder-slinging the RPD and unsheathing his machete as he took point.

  Tom and Chucho did the same.

  The fer-de-lance is a reddish-brown, white and black venomous snake; its coloring makes it easy to hide in the litter on the rain-forest floor. The one that reared up to strike Ryan was impossible to miss. It was more than ten feet long and its back was bigger across than his bicep.

  Ryan neatly stunned it with a backhanded blow of the side of his machete, then he forehanded and just as neatly clipped off its head. He kicked the still-writhing body into the brush.

  “Eyes skinned,” he reminded the others.

  To hike the six miles along the winding game trail, with all the ups and downs, the ravines to scale and the creeks to jump, with occasional water breaks to keep from getting too dehydrated, it took a little over two-and-a-half hours.

  They heard the hum of the generators long before they reached the prison’s outer fence.

  Through the branches they could see the bright clearing.

  “Tell the pirate if he makes a sound, he dies,” Ryan said to Chucho.

  Casacampo nodded that he understood the price of betrayal.

  Understanding it and being willing to pay it were two different things. Ryan sensed the man’s tension and guessed that he was considering the odds. If he could break free and alert his pals, he might get out alive and end up being a hero. Ryan wasn’t going to let him do that. Under other circumstances, he would have chilled the bastard at once. Under these circumstances there was still vital information to be had because Casacampo had visited the compound before.

  They crawled forward to the edge of the forest and gazed upon Xibalba, the mythical home of the all-powerful Lords of Death.

  Not much to recommend it, Ryan thought. It looked like a shit-hole jungle prison. Double high-wire fence with guard towers along the inside perimeter. Mildewed, windowless, concrete buildings on a roughly circular plain of dirt and scrub grass. People wandering around or stretched out in the shade.

  “Ask him where my friends are,” Ryan said to Chucho. “Ask him which building they’re being held in.”

  The Matachìn indicated the corner of a single-story structure that was just visible around the corner of the two-story cell block.

  “He says it’s probably th
at one,” Chucho said. “Razor House. He says it’s where the whitecoats saw people up.”

  “Do you believe him?” Tom asked Ryan.

  “If he lies, he dies,” Ryan said. “We won’t make it to the inner wire if those two guard towers are still manned come sunset. They’ve got a clear, overlapping kill zone between the two fences. We have to take them out nice and quiet so we can cut the wire and make our entry from the rear.”

  Getting through the wire was no problem because Tom had brought a pair of cutters in his pack. Getting out the same way might be more difficult, depending on how many enemy were still alive when the time came. The plan was to wait for the fading light of evening, snipe the tower gunners with the silenced SMGs, free the companions, chill as many Matachìn and Lords of Death as they could, then blow the whole place to rubble and beat feet back to the ship.

  A tall order, Ryan knew. There were an uncounted number of ways the whole scheme could implode. Every step was a potential stumbling block or dead end. But there was no going back.

  Suddenly, the order got even taller.

  In the jungle behind them, dogs started baying.

  “Shit, they’ve picked up our scent,” Tom said.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The tall and lanky Dr. Montejo had the diminutive bruja pressed up against the wall of the inoculation room, his hips driving while she clung around his neck, her legs wrapped around the small of his back.

  This while they made grunting, monkey sounds.

  Both of them kept glancing over at Krysty every few seconds to see if she was watching. If she was, they ratcheted up the frenzy of their rutting.

  Krysty, who lay strapped to a crucifixion table, a captive audience of one, viewed the recreational in-out with disdain.

  The bruja was a spinner.

  Her boyfriend was a whimperer.

  Which made for a very unpleasant spectacle.

  Krysty couldn’t decide if they were indulging in celebratory sex, or if this was their usual pastime come evening. It was, however, the first time she saw Dr. Montejo break a sweat.

  “Pul-eeeze!” she exclaimed. “I hate to break it to you two, but you’re not much to look at and you’re not that good at what you’re up to.”

  The comment, rendered in a foreign, and therefore unintelligible language, made Montejo hump harder and faster, and the bruja’s eyes rolled up in her head so Krysty could see only whites. After that, Krysty decided to just ignore them.

  When, some ten minutes later, they finally finished, the lab assistant pulled her bunched-up whitecoat skirt down over her somewhat wobbly, brown bandy legs. She licked her finger, then used it to smooth her eyebrow.

  Very classy.

  Aside from Mildred, who was by all accounts a special case, the whitecoats Krysty had seen had never impressed her all that much. This pair impressed her the least of any, and it wasn’t just their lame sexual technique or penchant for exhibitionism. Their attire notwithstanding, they appeared to be dumb as frigging fence posts.

  While Krysty watched, the doctor and his assistant began pulling on protective gear. They both donned latex gloves and some kind of heavy-duty antiviral masks with twin filtration canisters sticking out the sides of the mouthpiece. They also put on plastic goggles.

  From a countertop, Montejo picked up a clear plastic basin with a tight-fitting lid and carried it gingerly over to the rolling tray beside the crucifixion table. He opened the lid and took out a hypodermic syringe, moving in slow motion. The way he handled it, the thing might well have contained nitro.

  The fluid inside was the color of diluted blood.

  Or strawberry juice.

  About ten cc’s.

  It was an “Uh-oh” moment for Krysty. Accordingly, her prehensile hair drew up in tight ringlets of alarm. For the hundredth time, she tested the flex in her restraints. They didn’t give so much as a millimeter. Even though her wrist and ankle manacles had been removed, she was pinioned to the table, all except her neck and head.

  She knew that the strawberry fluid had been taken from Daniel, that his filthy spew was about to be put inside her and there was nothing she could do about it. It was as bad as rape. Mebbe even worse, because of what it was going to do to her once it was inside her veins.

  Krysty remembered all too well what the dying at Padre had looked like. People lying helpless in their own shit and piss and puke, waiting for the end. Could she be forced to be another Daniel, to become the knowing cause of something like that? Used to spread that kind of horror across the hellscape, leaving nothing behind but piles of corpses?

  She had no illusions on the subject. The spread of this disease, this plague, would end Deathlands, and the faint, but lingering promise of a resurrected nation would be torn out by the roots.

  Where were the others? she thought desperately. Were they already infected? How much serum from Daniel’s bones was needed? Could they make enough of it to dose them all at once? Only Mildred would know the answers, and she wasn’t here.

  Part of her was glad Ryan wasn’t with her, either. She was glad that he hadn’t lived long enough to be put through this obscenity.

  Even though she knew they couldn’t understand her, she addressed the whitecoats, anyway.

  “You can give me the rad-blasted disease,” she said, “but you’d better pray it kills me, because if I survive I will be coming after you both. And what I will do to you smirking, self-satisfied, murderous shit hooks, you can’t even begin to imagine.”

  The little bruja made animalistic “There, there” noises as Krysty twisted and fought against the restraints.

  Montejo’s bedside manner lacked even that subtlety.

  “Calma, por favor,” he said, putting his free hand on her breast.

  She was about to call on her Gaia powers, hoping that the Earth Mother would grant her enough strength to not only break her bonds, but to chill these two wastes of breath, when blasterfire erupted from outside the building.

  Dr. Montejo hesitated, plague hypo in one hand, Krysty in the other.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The baying sounds of the feral dogs rapidly grew louder and more frenzied. They seemed to be coming from three sides as the pack filtered through the jungle, closing in for the kill.

  “We can’t wait for sundown,” Ryan said, rising to his feet. “In another five minutes the dogs will have us pinned against the fence. That will alert the Matachìn and then we’ll be attacked front and rear, with no way out. Tom, cut the outside wire here. I’ll take the tower gunner on the right, Chucho you take the other one. Tom, get through the wire as quick as you can. Once the gun towers are dealt with, cross the no-man’s-land and cut us a hole in the inside fence.”

  “With the exception of your friends of course,” Chucho said, “everyone inside the compound has earned death. The so-called gods. Their pirate criminals. The whitecoats and dwarves who spread the plague, and the miscellaneous underlings and bootlicks that keep this place running. These creatures have sucked the blood of my people for decades. For that they must pay. And they must never be allowed to rise up again.”

  “But we can’t possibly kill them all,” Tom said as he took out the wire cutters. “We can’t cover all the ways out of here. Once we start shooting, they can scatter out the main gate or scale the fence and hightail it off into the jungle.”

  “Let them,” Ryan said. “If the dogs don’t run them down, they will have nothing to come back to here. We’ll make sure of that.”

  “We will sink all their boats so they can’t escape from this place,” Chucho added. “Let them try to swim to the mainland or make rafts from the trees. When the first few are eaten by sharks, there will be no more swimmers or rafters, I guarantee you. Once again there will be prisoners for life on this hell island.”

  Casacampo stood as if to join them in the next phase of the operation.

  “Not you,” Chucho told him.

  The commander’s face dropped.

  “You die her
e and now. Before you can betray us.”

  “But…”

  Chucho’s H&K coughed once in a summary execution. Fragments of Casacampo’s skull and brains splattered the leaves and branches behind them. The body flopped to the ground on its back, arms and legs twitching.

  “Shit,” Ryan muttered. He knew the scent of the gore would be a beacon for the dogs. And it would lead them right up to the hole in the fence. But he said nothing about it. It was too late to undo what had been done. The bastard deserved chilling, anyway, no matter whose hand did the deed.

  And time was running out.

  Ryan hurried away, concealed just inside the edge of the forest, moving parallel to the wire. When he arrived at a point opposite the gun tower, he peered through the dense foliage. The Matachìn in the tower wasn’t looking his way. Under the shade of the tower’s peaked metal roof, he had his back to the perimeter and he was staring down at the goings-on inside the compound.

  Ryan crawled to the wire, then bellied down in front of it. He lined up the shot, bracing the silencer’s fat barrel against the mesh. The distance was no more than seventy-five yards. He flipped the fire selector switch to triburst, snugged up the buttstock and acquired the target.

  When the tower guard turned his way, Ryan tightened down on the trigger until it broke. The H&K coughed a 3-round stutter and pushed back hard against his shoulder. Downrange, the slap of metal on meat was lost in the steady throb of Xibalba’s generators. The man in the tower threw up his hands.

  Not in surprise.

  Not in celebration.

  In the ultimate surrender.

  His body dropped out of sight behind the tower’s front wall.

  Ryan scooted back to the forest. No longer concerned about being observed, he sprinted to the gaping cut in the wire. He got there just as Chucho arrived. Both towers were now unmanned. The way in was clear. They slipped through the break in the fence and crossed the stretch of open ground on a dead run.

  Tom was ahead of them, already kneeling at the second fence, working like a madman with the cutters. When they reached him, the trader held open the hole he’d made so they could enter.