by James Axler
Down the row, J.B. chucked a spent mag on top of the still-twitching bodies and as he cracked in a fresh one he shouted up at the second tier, “Is that all you bedwetters have got?”
The challenge resounded through the prison.
Though they couldn’t understand English, the Matachìn got the drift and took up the gauntlet at once.
Autofire rained down from the tier above, in the enclosed space the concentrated roar was mind-numbing. Slugs cratered the concrete floor, sending bits of lead and rubble in all directions.
The walkway offered no concealment and no protection for the shooters. It had holes in it for traction, which could be seen through. Behind the muzzle-flashes were bald-headed men who fired bursts over the railing, then ducked back.
Tom, Chucho and Ryan aimed their MGs at the undersides of the walkway, at the moving shadows, and returned fire.
Pirates above them crumpled, falling over the railing, cartwheeling and smashing into the corridor floor.
The survivors retreated down the rectangle of walkway, to the farthest end of the cell block.
The shooting petered out; the echoes died away.
“The way things stand, this isn’t going to end well,” Ryan said.
Tom had to agree. They were looking at a stalemate until one side or the other ran out of ammo. Chances were, the good guys would come up empty first.
“Chucho and I can take the rear stairways,” Tom said. “We can rush them from both sides of the walkway. While we’re keeping them busy, the rest of you can charge the stairs at the far end.”
Ryan nodded. “We’ll hold off until you open up.”
When Tom and Chucho reached the back of the cell block, the spot where they had to part company, Chucho said, “I think we can get them all, but you’ve got to wait until I start shooting.”
“Done,” Tom said.
He went up one staircase and Chucho went up the other. Concealed from view, they moved low and fast along the walkway, close to the cells. Tom could see a wall behind the Matachìn position at the far end, and at the center, the top of a doorway. He saw movement, too. Seven or eight pirates crouched well back from the railing.
Across the open space, Chucho was in position on the opposite walkway, kneeling with his RPD shouldered.
Tom crept a little closer, then raised his weapon.
Whether the Matachìn sensed they were about to come under full frontal attack, or whether they just decided it was time to make their move to harder cover, they all straightened and turned for the door.
Someone spoke at that end of the hall, clear as a bell, in Spanish. The big bald-headed pirate in charge paused with his hand on the doorknob and looked back, puzzled.
Then Chucho popped up and let it rip.
Tom did the same, rising as he fired, and advancing on the targets.
The double stream of slugs chopped the Matachìn down in their tracks. Not one returned fire, not one made it through the door. They died on the walkway, a few feet from safety.
Ryan and the others started charging up the staircases, but it was all over.
“What happened?” Tom asked Chucho. “Why did they stop?”
Chucho’s eyes glittered. “A little trick I picked up.”
From behind Tom a familiar voice said in English, “Wait! It’s a trap!”
Tom turned his head to look; he couldn’t help it. When he turned back, Chucho was laughing. “Well, nuke me if that ain’t a trick and a half,” Tom said.
Ryan saw the partially open door and said, “Better check in there. Blasters up.” He kicked the door back and entered with Tom right on his heels. The windowless room was deserted, but it wasn’t empty.
There were beds, a sink, a flush toilet, countertops, and it was crammed with stuff. At one end of a table cluttered with other objects, on an open blanket lay an assortment of weapons. Familiar weapons.
A scoped longblaster.
A SIG-Sauer pistol.
A pump action 12-gauge.
Revolvers.
And an antique blaster.
Tanner made a beeline for his Civil War treasure. He pulled out the LeMat and checked the nipples and wadding. “Just the way I left it,” he said, strapping the holstered weapon around his waist.
The others hurriedly reclaimed their hardware. Like Doc, they made sure everything was in good working order.
“What is this room?” J.B. asked.
“Mebbe a warden’s or guards’ quarters, back in the day,” Ryan said.
“Have a look at this,” Krysty said, waving the others over to the overloaded counter along one wall. In an array of covered plastic containers there were viscous-looking pastes: brown, green, golden-yellow. She popped one of the lids and sniffed. “Gaia!” she gasped, holding it at arm’s length. “That is just awful.”
“What is it?”
“I have no clue,” Krysty said. “But if smells could kill…”
“This is interesting, too,” Doc said, holding open a fat, spiral-bound notebook. “Perhaps you can make sense of it, Mildred. It is beyond me.”
Tom looked over Mildred’s shoulder as she scanned the open pages. He had never seen anything like it.
“Could be Sanskrit,” Mildred said, flipping pages.
“Chicken scratching, you mean,” Tom said.
Then she came to a series of hand-drawn diagrams or schematics.
“These look like chemical formulas,” Mildred said. “But there are symbols here for elements that don’t exist, or at least I’ve never heard of.”
“Mebbe it’s a kid’s game,” J.B. suggested.
“No kids here,” Jak said.
“The symbology is too consistent for it to be something like that,” Mildred went on. “Some of it almost makes sense, mathematically. If this is biochem, it’s not like anything I ever learned.”
“Where did it come from?” Krysty said.
Mildred shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Who knows and who cares?” J.B. said with growing impatience. “If none of us can read it, it might as well be flies on dog shit.”
He had a point.
After the room and the second tier were mined with C-4, Tom said, “I think we’re ready to blow this dump to hell.”
“Not quite yet,” Mildred corrected him. “First we’ve got to destroy the freezies who haven’t been reanimated. As long as they can be resurrected, so can the plague weapon.”
“Blow them up, too,” Tom said.
“Not necessary,” Mildred told him. “All we have to do is pull the plugs on their cryo tanks and they’ll start to thaw out. Without a computer regulating the defrosting, their bodies will turn to icy slunk and then rot in the heat.”
Though the grounds were still crawling with terrified but smiling bootlicks, they found the entrance to the Cold House unguarded. Tom, the companions and Chucho just walked in and made themselves at home. Along the back wall was a row of stainless-steel cylinders, practically floor-to-ceiling high, and twice as wide as fifty-five-gallon drums, each with its own set of LCD readout monitors and massive, armored power conduits.
“I don’t see any rad-blasted plugs to pull,” J.B. said.
“Then how about this?” Mildred asked. She commenced to walk down the line of tanks, firing bursts from her 9 mm subgun point-blank into the front of each of them, emptying the 30-round, stick mag. Supercooled air jetted from the holes punched in the thin steel, and when it met the tropical heat it turned instantly to dense fog.
The clouds of condensing moisture were so thick they had to back out of the room, and they did so coughing. Before he backed out, Tom tossed down the last of the blocks of C-4.
J.B.’s spectacles looked like they’d been frosted. Scowling, he took them off and wiped them on the tail of his T-shirt.
“We need to put some distance between us and the C-4 before I detonate,” Tom told them. “When this goes off, it’s gonna be a big bang.”
“We can’t go out the way we c
ame in,” Ryan said. “That’s where the dog packs are coming from. We’ve got to go out the front gate.”
“Trouble is,” Tom said, “the boat that brung us is the other way.”
“The boats that brought us are tied up at the end of the path that leads to the front gate,” Krysty said.
“Big enough to carry all of us?” Tom asked.
“Certainly,” Doc said. “Big enough to carry us all in a modicum of comfort.”
“Problem solved, then,” Ryan said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When the gunfire started outside, Daniel Desipio lay on his back on a gurney in the Razor House recovery room. Because he was still in terrible pain from the unanesthetized marrow-suck, the whitecoats hadn’t bothered to strap him down. After all, he could hardly walk, so how could he run? And where would he run to?
He heard the sound of the main door being kicked open, then the tramp of boots and angry shouts booming down the hall outside. He recognized the voice at once and his blood ran cold. By now Ryan Cawdor should have been dead and wormy. Instead he was calling out to his friends. He had come to rescue them, and perhaps he was already too late. Holy fuck, he’s going to find me, Daniel thought.
As doors banged back down the hallway, he managed to roll off the gurney, but in the process he knocked over a rolling tray of surgical instruments. When he hit the floor, white-hot pain exploded in his hips and he lost consciousness for a second. The shouting and footfalls woke him up. He had to assume that Cawdor and whoever was with him would search room to room, chilling the whitecoats as they went. He knew he’d get no mercy, either. From the sound of it, they were coming his way. Hand over hand, dragging his legs behind him, he crawled on his belly to the nearest cover, beneath the stainless-steel operating table.
When the door opened, it wasn’t the one-eyed man who appeared, it was Dr. Yorte. The head whitecoat rushed in and quickly and quietly closed the door behind him. Leaning his back against it, he gasped for breath. His eyes were wide with fear as he swept his fingers through his thick black hair again and again.
Dr. Yorte was far too preoccupied to notice that his plague vector was gone from the gurney.
Daniel recalled the words spoken earlier, as he had writhed under the corkscrewing needle. “Maybe we should suck the cells from his spine. Oh, no, wait a minute. I forgot, he doesn’t have one. Heh-heh-heh-heh.”
Waves of pain shot down his legs and blurred his mind, jumbling the memories of his 135-year life. The distinction between the plastic surgeon and his predark publisher vanished. They became one and the same, a single object of hatred and loathing, a fixture of his existence.
Meanwhile, Dr. Yorte had crossed the room, and dropped to his hands and knees in front of a low cabinet built into the back wall. He opened the little cabinet door, pushed aside the contents, then squeezed himself inside and pulled the door shut behind him.
The shouts from the hallway faded, and after a pause more gunfire erupted from outside the building. Daniel lay there, listening with every muscle tensed, while the fighting escalated. There was one hell of a gun battle going on.
For the moment, he was safe.
He closed his eyes, and kept them closed for what seemed a very long time, until the shooting stopped.
Under his nose, amid the scattering of gleaming surgical tools, was a scalpel, its edge keen as a razor. Almost of its own accord, his hand moved to grab it. The feel of the steel handle against his palm was electrifying. A terrible energy animated his limbs, driving out the pain in his hips.
No spine? he thought, squeezing the scalpel so hard his knuckles turned white.
Then the epiphany hit. Before him was the opportunity he had been longing for: the time had finally come for him to write his own story.
Rising shakily to his feet, the Fire Talker approached the cabinet. “No spine, huh?” he growled down at the little door. He ripped open the cabinet, reached in and snatched hold of Dr. Yorte by the hair. As he hauled the whitecoat out of the hidey-hole, he rammed his right knee into the middle of his face and felt the nose cartilage crush. The impact made pain lance into his hip, but Daniel was past caring.
The worm had turned.
Yorte groaned at the stunning blow and went limp. Daniel dumped him onto his back, then straddled his chest, pinning his arms to the floor with his knees. Wielding the scalpel back and forth, back and forth in a frenzied attack, the Fire Talker slashed through white fabric and into the brown hairless skin. Quite literally, and in the span of a minute, he cut the man to ribbons, down to the bone from forehead to sternum. Because he was holding his breath the whole time, Daniel nearly passed out. With an effort, he lurched to his feet and stepped away from his handiwork.
Yorte, still horribly alive, was flapping his arms, smearing his blood, and making a red snow-angel on the white-tiled floor.
The smell of the gore turned Daniel’s stomach. He projectile-vomited, splattering his victim and the floor at his feet.
Bloody scalpel in his bloody hand, the Fire Talker stumbled from the room, down the hall, his paper hospital gown baring his ass to the world.
After two lifetimes of subjugation, of humiliation, he was finally victorious.
He had started his own story, at last. He had cast himself as the indomitable pulp hero. There were no pages of space-filling dialogue. No interminable backstory explanations that never quite made sense. This was the real deal. Daniel Desipio had become an avenging angel of the perpetually downtrodden, the victimized. And he wasn’t done yet. There still had to be an ending, a shocking but appropriate climax. He owed that kind of finish to his audience, even if it was an audience of one.
Daniel staggered out of the building, then across the yard to the door of Jaguar House. Hounds of hell were baying inside, clawing at the door to be freed.
Imprisoned in the dark.
Starved.
Taunted.
Furious.
They would be the instruments of his vengeance on the criminal monsters still roaming the compound.
Having finally discovered his spine, Daniel found to his surprise that he couldn’t undiscover it.
He knew he was just as much of a beast as those he was about to destroy. And his crimes were much more subtle than the machete chop and the shotgun blast. They were cowardly, backstabbing crimes of mass murder against the innocent and the helpless. He knew that for justice to be done he, too, had to be punished.
At last Daniel Desipio was the author of something truly original, his lifelong dream come true. Throwing aside the scalpel, he hurled open the door to Jaguar House.
The dogs were on him in an instant, pulling him down onto the courtyard, biting into him as he screamed, shaking their massive heads, tearing out his flesh in great hunks.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ryan hustled the others out the prison’s front gate ahead of him. He backed out of Xibalba looking down the sights of his RPD, covering the retreat. Figures were running around between the buildings, but no one was coming after them.
Harmonica Tom stopped fifty feet down the path, shrugged out of his pack and then dug around in it for the remote detonator. Holding it up for the others to see, he flipped off the safety switch and said, “Any last words for these bastards?”
“Fuck ’em,” Jak said.
“My sentiments exactly,” Doc said.
“Anybody else?” Tom asked.
“Do it,” Ryan said.
“Fire in the hole,” Tom said.
When he hit the button, the whole world jolted. Even in daylight, the flash through the trees was blinding, and the cluster of C-4 booms so tightly spaced they seemed almost simultaneous. It was the kind of explosion that nothing could survive. Debris began to rain down, falling through the forest canopy. Big chunks ripped off branches and released showers of green leaves.
“We’re too close,” Ryan said. “We need to move.”
As they hurried down the path, he envisioned t
he destruction in his mind’s eye. The site cratered, leveled, littered with pieces of concrete. When he turned his head, he saw Chucho was watching his expression and smiling like a proud pappy. The other Hero Twin was thinking the same thing he was.
Absolute nukin’ wipe-out.
As they proceeded down the narrow trail, after the explosions’ echoes faded, another sound rolled over them from the far side of the compound, the sound of the wild dog pack going crazy as it closed in for a kill.
Then came a terrible warbling scream.
So much for the gods of the underworld, Ryan thought.
AS ATAPUL X CRASHED through the rain forest, his heavy footfalls jarred the mask that still covered his head. The terrible explosions at the heart of the prison were still echoing off the hillsides. Running away from the fight held no shame for him. He had nothing important vested in the effort, nor had any of the others. To creatures who lived as long as they did, the fictions of Xibalba and the Lords of Death were simply entertaining diversions while they waited for rescue.
The jungle felt like home to him; not because he had lived here for more than three-quarters of a century, but because it reminded him of his real home, far far away—the deep shade, the constant heat and humidity, the high oxygen content, the profusion of edibles from which dietary pastes could be made.
The EM pulse of nukeday had been the beacon that had lured Atapul X and his crew to Earth from deep space. During the planetary survey the unthinkable happened: the mother ship had malfunctioned, fallen out of orbit and crashed. Lucky for the surviving crew of the survey shuttle, they had been mapping the island as a possible habitation site for a future colonist base. It was easily defensible, with natural barriers to invasion.
The Lords of Death had never once left Xibalba because, not being human, they didn’t recognize its squalor; they were satisfied by the prison and the surrounding jungle. They needed to be close to the shuttle when help finally arrived.
The initial takeover of the prison from the Matachìn had been easy. The pirates were a superstitious and ignorant lot; their leaders were deranged maniacs. The Mayan mythos, coupled with a show of advanced weaponry, quickly brought them to heel. Atapul X and his crew understood the use of plague weapons, and after the initial debacle in Panama City, had designed a campaign of conquest around them. To survive the centuries until their distress signal was answered, they had to acquire a steady supply of goods and services. In a nuke-blasted world, this required an empire of sorts—cargo ships traveling back and forth from the north, pack trains crossing the isthmus—a primitive extractive bureaucracy.
