by James Axler
“What do you reckon that thing is, anyway?” he asked Krysty.
She looked at him as if the question were double stupe, at the very least. “It’s Godzilla.”
Claudia looked at them. “Sí, sí. Es God-zee-ya.”
“I’ll be switched,” he said as the little monster fetched up against a big bowl with faded fruits painted along the rim. It continued to try to advance, little wind-up motor grumbling and stumpy feet churning. “I remember when I was a kid, how disappointed I was when I found out he wasn’t real.”
“Then you grew up and found out there were plenty of real monsters to go around,” Krysty said, smiling.
“Ain’t it the truth.”
She was obviously not all the way back to normal, because she didn’t correct his grammar. She hadn’t done that often lately. Instead she looked again at a framed print hanging on the wall beyond the head of the table, over Don Tenorio’s shoulder. It reproduced a stylized kind of painting of a woman in a hooded robe surrounded by golden radiance, standing on a crescent shape like a moon, only black. This time Claudia noted her interest and spoke, seriously for once.
“She says that is the Lady of the Valley,” Doc translated.
“I’ve seen a lot of those pictures around since we arrived,” J.B. remarked between bites. “People still hold to all that religious stuff down here?”
“Oh, yes,” Tenorio said. “Veneration of the Lady had deep roots. After the conquest by the Spanish she appeared in that manner you see pictured to an Indian as the Virgin of Guadalupe. But before that she had been worshiped for centuries by the Indians of the Valley as Tonantzin. In both guises she is among other things a spirit of the Earth.”
“Gaia,” Krysty said.
He smiled. “Given the seismic activity you’ve experienced here, no doubt you can understand how a goddess of the Earth might play a major role in the lives of our people through time.”
“Yes,” Krysty said with a smile. “I can.”
“DIDN’T YOU ALWAYS TELL ME Gaia wasn’t a person?” Ryan asked when they were back aboard the Paloma¸ putting for home.
“Yes,” Krysty said, seated once more in the deck chair in the prow.
“Then what’s with all this ‘Lady of the Valley’ stuff? You acted like you knew what the Mexes were talking about.”
“The people themselves personalize the forces of the Earth. They envision those forces as a lady, a mother-goddess. Because the forces are so very strong here, their belief is likewise.”
“So she’s just a luci of some kind? A vision that ain’t real.”
“The forces are real, so she is real, here in the valley. She’s the way the people perceive the reality—they put a human face on it.”
He shook his head. “This is all miles beyond me.”
She reached up to touch his cheek. He felt the slight stubble that sprouted by afternoon no matter how raw he scraped his face each morning rasp beneath her fingertips. “Don’t worry, lover. The important thing is Gaia’s power is great here, greater than I’ve ever felt before, and it’s helping me heal from what Mildred tells me was a very nasty injury.”
“Guess you’re right.”
He was relieved to hear the slightly unsteady footfall of Doc on the deck behind him. He turned.
“It would appear the alcade is more relaxed about allowing his subjects to carry weapons than most barons of our experience, friend Ryan,” Doc remarked. Tenorio himself was back by the cabin discussing an unrolled chart with Ernesto.
“He sure hasn’t uttered peep one about our packing,” J.B. remarked, rolling up to join the little group.
“Where’s Jak?” Krysty asked him.
“Back aft, watchin’ the wake as if he expects to see naked women splashing in it.”
The Armorer was carrying his Uzi on its long Israeli-style sling that allowed it to ride horizontal at just above belt level, ready for instant use. For his part Ryan had left his Steyr sniper rifle back in their quarters. His SIG-Sauer P-226 seemed sufficient, especially given how well-armed their host’s escorts were. Aside from the team manning the big Browning in the pintle atop the control cabin, he had two bodyguards, no doubt Jaguar Knights, one armed with a Heckler & Koch MP-5 K, a compact 9 mm submachine gun with a foregrip shaped rather like a miniature table leg as well as a pistol rear grip, the other with a long FN FAL .308 battle rifle. The longblaster man was wiry. The boy with the machine pistol, blocky. Both were short; both cheerful as virtually every one of Tenorio’s scavvies the companions had encountered to date seemed to be, but both also seemed tough as the flows of black chilled lava that seamed the valley. The escorts weren’t smoking and joking just now; like the heavy machine gunners, they were intently scanning the water and the rubble rising to each side.
“Boys don’t look like they’re watching just for practice, do they?” J.B. asked Ryan.
Having finished his discussion, Don Tenorio stepped forward to join his guests. “Your people are pretty sharp-looking, Don Tenorio,” Ryan said. “So much it makes me wonder what they’re looking out for.”
The small, spare man shrugged. “The city is full of dangers. The most prevalent, obviously, are environmental—falling debris, the sudden collapse of a building, snags beneath the water. But there are living dangers, as well, some human, some animal, some…” He shrugged expressively.
“You keep patrol boats out on the water, I notice.”
“Oh, yes. The more so since the Chichimecs invaded the valley in force. Sometimes they try to send raiding parties into the city. And sometimes they succeed, because the ruins are too huge for us to throw a completely effective cordon around, even if we stripped everyone from our work of reclamation, which would defeat our very purpose. So we stay armed and alert. Also there are…things…in the water and in the city itself, and some of them are a great deal more sinister than the rat Claudia killed. The giant axolotl and bass are edible and provide an excellent source of food. Others seem to regard us the same way. Those folk who held that death still stalked the drowned streets and buildings were not altogether wrong, even though the plagues had long since lost their virulence.”
Krysty shook her head. “I don’t understand why you have muties in and around the city, since it was never nuked and there’s so little background radiation.”
“We have wondered the same thing, Señorita Wroth. Many mutant beings, such as the giant rattler you encountered coming over the mountains, no doubt wandered down from the radiation belts to the north in search of prey.” The companions had given their hosts a carefully edited account of their journey, especially the escape from the eruption, that made no reference to the mat-trans. So far they seemed to accept that the companions had driven down from el norte, skirting the rad wastes by keeping to the coastal region west of the valley’s sheltering ring of mountains.
“How then might one account for such aquatic denizens as the great axolotls and fish, Don Tenorio?” Doc asked.
“That has provoked much debate among us, Doctor. Some suggest the young may have swum down from the north in the rivers that flow into the lake. Others object, pointing out that the zones of heavy radiation lie on the other side of the watershed, in the lands we call the Great Chichimeca, the realm of the Chichimecs. They suggest that there may have been agents at work in producing mutation other than simple radiation. Some exotic form of biological warfare, perhaps. Those who favor the migration theory point out that in all the extensive scientific literature we have recovered and cataloged there is not the slightest hint of such research. The biowar proponents answer back that such research would be classified the most secure secret, the files encrypted…and so the debate rages.”
“Just like whitecoats,” J.B. sniffed. “Always wrangling about stuff that doesn’t actually add up to diddly-squat.”
“Ah, but I would beg humbly to disagree, Señor Dix. Whether we are seeking new knowledge or trying to reclaim what our species has lost, we cannot know in advance what bit or piece might
help to lift us—lift the world—from the misery and devastation the war left in its wake.”
“You also don’t know when you might resurrect some of the knowledge that brought all the destruction about,” Krysty said.
“Usted tiene razón. You speak truth, fair lady. Yet we persist, recognizing the risk. What have you encountered in this life that does not entail risk, even of deadly peril?”
Krysty smiled and inclined her head, acknowledging his point. Her distrust for science and technology didn’t outweigh her own regard for truth. She maintained her integrity no matter the cost, which was often not small in the world they inhabited.
The Armorer barked a brisk laugh. “Life’s fatal, that’s for nuke-blasted sure.”
They were crossing another open area. This one, however, wasn’t entirely devoid of buildings. A pyramid of stone steps rose from the midst, its base submerged in the lake.
A shadow crossed Don Tenorio’s spare features when his guests pointed it out. “The great sacrificial pyramid of Tenochtitlán,” he said. “Many thousands of lives were offered to the old gods there, oceans of blood streamed down those steps. It was discovered, excavated and partially restored before the war.”
He shook his head in bleak amusement. “An irony that it survived untouched, of all things.”
The skinny bodyguard said something in Spanish. “Or perhaps not. As Ésteban reminds me, Don Hector asserts it’s proof of the power of the ancient gods, whose worship he seeks to resurrect in the valley.”
A gap-toothed grin split the longblaster man’s dark face. He spat over the rail in the general direction of the sacrificial pyramid.
As they passed it, Doc pointed with his cane toward a party of three scavvies, roped together and scaling the apparently stone facade of a building just to port of the boat’s course, which tilted perilously to the northeast. “What system do you use to assign tasks to your subjects, Don Tenorio?”
“Assign?” Their host blinked. “Sometimes I offer suggestions, even bonuses and awards for particular tasks. But seldom do I ‘assign. ’I do not hold so much control as you appear to believe, my friend. Mostly my people do as they see best, for their own profit and the advantage of us all.”
“You keep a mighty loose rein on your subjects for a baron,” J.B. said.
“I fear you have been laboring under a misapprehension. I am no baron. I’m not even a mayor, although it amuses my associates to call me alcade. The people of the city are not my subjects. They are free companions—stockholders, if you like, in what centuries ago would have been called a company of adventurers.”
“Don Tenorio. ¡Mira!” came a cry from overhead. The assistant machine gunner was pointing ahead.
A cloud of dust roiled from a cavity that might once have been a shop display window. A young woman stood amid the dust, holding a rag to her face and frantically waving for attention.
The woman screamed something. “Cave in!” Don Tenorio exclaimed. “We must go to their assistance.”
The pilot had already increased the throttle. The boat reared back slightly on a mobile mound of green scummy water and roared ahead, not fast—it couldn’t brake like a land wag, of course—but faster than its walking-pace before. They crossed an intersection, coming perilously near the top of a submerged traffic light. Then the pilot was backing the engine and slewing the big gleaming water wag slightly sideways to kill its forward momentum.
Using long metal poles, the baron’s two bodyguards halted the boat’s lingering drift toward the building. It bumped up against the sunken wall of the structure, using its own bumper of old tires lashed to the outside of the hull to cushion and protect it. The skinny bodyguard with the FN longblaster jumped into the opening where the woman stood covering her face with a handkerchief and coughing, caught a line tossed him by his burlier comrade, fastened it to a jutting chunk of metal.
Don Tenorio was next over into the building, a structure with mostly intact bluish-black windows that rose three further stories and then broke off. The wide guard with the stubby machine pistol helped hand him across. The alcade seemed impatient with the man’s solicitude. Shrugging him off, he plunged into the building with his guards, seemingly oblivious as to whether his guests followed or not.
The scavvie woman’s face was obscured by the rag she was using as an impromptu air filter. Her hair was as startlingly red as Krysty’s; but unlike the crimson of Krysty’s sentient locks it was a deep red that glinted with metallic highlights in the morning sunlight like fine copper wire. She was taller than average for the people they had encountered in the valley, although shorter than Krysty. Ryan caught an impression of lithe but well-padded athletic grace, of jade-green eyes flashing him a somehow appraising glance above the rag. Then she whirled and was gone into the shadowed interior.
J.B. looked inquiringly to Ryan. His Uzi was up and ready, which meant he was, too. Ryan nodded. “Let’s follow. Eyes wide.”
Krysty was on her feet. “You sure?” Ryan asked her.
“Sure am, lover. If there’re people who need help, I’ll do what I can.” She smiled. “A little exercise will do me good.”
Ryan helped hand her across to Doc, who had jumped over ahead of them. Then came Ryan, and lastly Jak, still turning a leaf-bladed throwing knife in his chalk-white fingers.
They raced through a room empty but for decayed and colorless carpet lying in fungoid patches on the floor. Whatever furnishings or decoration had once occupied the room had since been shaken loose or otherwise stripped. Into the guts of the building, the woman led the way, followed by Don Tenorio and his pair of guards, the companions trooping after. The interior was dank and rank with the smells of mildew and stagnant water, dead marine life and again, a lingering sweetish stink that all knew well as a hallmark of human death.
There was no way the smell could have persisted for a century. Ryan wondered if it was the result of some kind of psychic emanation or, more likely, simple illusion created by expectation. He mentioned the thoughts to J.B. in a quick, low murmur.
The Armorer chuckled quietly. “There’s not a reason in the world somebody might not have cashed in here in the not too distant past, too,” he said. As had Ryan, he kept his voice hushed, though neither could have said why. “Leastwise the dust thrown up by the cave-in seems to have mostly settled already.”
They pounded up two flights of diamond-panel metal stairs with big blotches of some kind of actual fungus growing on the peeling enamel of the walls. Their footsteps echoed like the beats of great barbaric drums in the enclosed well, reverberating back up at them weirdly distorted by the water that flooded the lower levels. In his mind’s eye Ryan saw a vision of just such drums atop the resurrected pyramid they had passed, voices booming to drown out the screams of the victims….
He shook his head. Not too healthy, mooning over fantasies when a chem storm might be rolling in.
They broke out into an echoing space lit poorly by lanterns; the water threw back the dim yellow light in ripple patterns against the walls and the faces of the party. Ryan realized they were on a gallery toward the top of what had been a several-story atrium. On the level above, the walls fell back farther away into a wider open space. Below them, a busted-off stair protruded from stinking water whose black surface glistened with just a hint of poisonously pearlescent taint, as if just a bit of oil had been spilled on it. A curved metal pipe serving as a handrail had peeled away from the steps to nowhere and jutted into the air, its end corroded and raw.
As they all followed the redheaded scavvie woman around two sides of the gallery, Krysty’s steps faltered. Ryan caught her quickly by the biceps, fearing she might topple over the safety rail into the murky water.
“You all right?”
“Not me,” she said, shaking her head. “Us. Something here, something bad…”
A few yards ahead of them their guide stood waving them through a door. Don Tenorio started to go through first. His bulkier bodyguard, the slab-faced man with the s
horty machine pistol, shouldered the baron aside almost brusquely and stepped through first, his blaster held ready in both scarred hands.
A boom and a flash of blue-white fire filled the atrium.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
Screaming horribly, the bodyguard reeled back onto the catwalk. As he turned, Ryan saw that his face and the now-smoldering front of his khaki shirt were torn with dozens of tiny holes, some round, some ragged, some bizarrely shaped like the letter T. Ryan had seen such wounds before. They happened when somebody poured a handful of carpet tacks down the barrel of a blaster, usually a muzzle-loading black powder makeshift, and fired them off into a human target. The tiny wildly gyrating projectiles went every which way and bled velocity like a severed artery. They were entirely ineffectual beyond the range of a good healthy spit. Fired from close enough for the muzzle-flare to set the target’s clothes alight, though, they could ruin your whole day.
The bodyguard lurched into the rail and cartwheeled over it. The clench reflex tightened his finger on the trigger as he went over. The little bullet-sprayer was still flaming and yammering when his body disappeared into the dark water with a splash.
Ryan caught a glimpse of the red-haired scavvie woman standing by the door, gloating light gleaming in those strange green eyes. He was already drawing his SIG-Sauer. He sensed a weight descending toward his back, started to turn. Something slammed the back of his head. His skull filled with spark-shot darkness.
HE CAME BACK to consciousness on his knees in the gloom of the atrium. He had been elsewhere for just a few seconds, apparently, briefly stunned rather than unconscious. He felt a quick spasm of relief. A head blow that actually put you out generally left you with a bleeder in your skull that would chill you sure.
Of course, chilling seemed a likely item on the agenda in the not too distant future. He could feel the absence of his handblaster. Rough hands yanked him to his feet. One started to tug on the hilt of his broad-bladed panga.
