by James Axler
A yellow blade of light fell from a boarded window of what should be the front room. Signaling Doc to keep lookout, Ryan stole up to it, peered inside.
The room was simply furnished: a couple of scavenged tubular-steel-and-plastic chairs, a folding card table with a lantern on it. There was a picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the wall in an ornate frame that looked like gold and was no doubt painted plastic.
A tall figure wearing a foul loincloth and the head and cape of a wolf stalked back and forth across the floor, which had been formed by pouring blood into the dirt; constant foot traffic had compacted and then polished it so that it looked almost like seamless maroon tile. Howling Wolf was gaunt, almost emaciated. The hollows of his face and between his ribs were accentuated by the streaks of blood, now dried and black in the lantern light, that he had apparently poured over himself. Ryan could smell the stench of the rotting blood, and hear the buzz of flies around him. As startling as it was, the bizarre apparition of the Chichimec prophet wasn’t what caught his attention. Nor were the two bodyguards in his field of vision, a giant mutie with no hair, small pointed ears and slits in a muzzlelike face in lieu of a nose who held a Browning autoloading shotgun, and a human armed with some kind of machine pistol with an extended tubular-steel folding stock and front and rear pistol grips.
What grabbed his eye instead was Felicidad Mendoza, trim and cool in camou blouse, shorts and hiking boots, her copper hair drawn back in a severe bun and glinting like wire. She sat behind the table watching Nezahualcoyótl with a bland expression, as if he neither looked nor smelled the least bit out of the ordinary.
Their voices were clearly audible. They were speaking in Spanish, however. Ryan tapped whatever part of Doc it was that was close enough to reach.
When the old man turned, Ryan said softly, “Translate. Keep it down, though, or we’re both catching the last train for the coast.”
“Surely, my boy. Ahem. The frightfully bedizened specimen is saying ‘Passed right through his flab. He should recover fully.’
“‘Especially with the antibiotics I brought,’ the brazen hussy—highly appropriate term, given the color of her hair—says.”
Ryan was keeping watch now, his blaster ready. There were still no signs of movement in the crooked streets nearby. Felicidad was apparently trusting her host to make the security arrangements, and he in turn was sloppy. Well, Ryan guessed, there was nothing like being surrounded by hundreds of literally blood-thirsty fanatic followers to lull a man into a sense of complacency.
“You trust your whitecoat technology more than our ancestor’s healing wisdom?” the false prophet asked.
“Absolutely,” Felicidad said, “where matters like preventing infection are concerned. That’s how Don Hector will conquer all, by taking the best and strongest of the old ways and the new and bending them to his will.”
“As you say. We shall continue to have use of the boy for so long as we need him. I cannot say the same for his uncle, though. The old man has grown querulous. I think it is time for our gods to accept his flowery sacrifice.”
“That’s your concern—if you can control the boy without him.”
“The boy is used to obeying me. I’ll tell him his uncle grew sick and died unexpectedly. It won’t enter the brat’s simple mind to doubt my word.”
“So long as you’re willing to stake your life upon it,” Felicidad said, and Ryan could hear the heavily affected boredom in her voice, “since that’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“Do not try my patience. Bad enough Don Hector dishonors me by sending a mere woman to dictate to me, without my suffering your impertinence.”
“I’ll have you know I’m now Don Hector’s sec boss, my dear father having earned his own flowery death. And don’t forget, you are nothing but Don Hector’s creature.”
“Enough! Do you forget that Don Hector is far, and my followers are close at hand? Did I give the word they would tear your harlot’s carcass limb from limb.”
“Maybe,” Felicidad said, inspecting her fingernails. “But if they did, I’d be sure to inform them, loudly, how you’ve been betraying them to Hector from the start, and how today they were supposed to be slaughtered—after destroying the weak fools from the city, which I note you failed utterly to accomplish.”
“The cowards hung back. I deployed the bulk of my men to fall upon them—as Don Hector directed. But when we struck the ranks of your valley troops the city scum were nowhere to be found. Only when my men had turned to fall upon the flanks of Hector’s force did the he-goats fire treacherously on us from ambush.”
“It doesn’t matter how you failed, only that you failed. Fortunately, for you, your failure wound up costing us little. Don Hector and his Eagle Knights have slipped into the city and captured the fool Tenorio. I myself took prisoner the red-haired witch woman and the black bitch before riding here.”
Ryan gritted his teeth. He raised the SIG-Sauer to press its muzzle to the crack. Doc checked the motion.
“Not if you would live to rescue Krysty and Mildred, my dear boy.”
For a moment Ryan’s eye blazed like a lethal blue star. Then he swallowed and nodded.
Doc resumed translating the copper-haired woman’s words. “—notice only two of the outlanders tied up outside. You were instructed to capture all four who remained encamped with the army.”
“The leader resisted and was slain. The commander of the raiding party has already given his heart to the gods for his ineptitude. The other, the older man, could not be found. My spies say he is given to bouts of confusion. Without doubt he’s wandering the night, befuddled.” Doc’s eyebrows rose in indignation as he translated.
“He is surely of no consequence. What would you have me do with the captives we did obtain?”
“Hector wanted that arrogant one-eyed-dog Ryan to watch his friends tortured to death for the gods’ delectation, before he made his own sacrifice. Since he’s dead, it doesn’t matter what you do with the others. The important one is the witch with the red hair that moves like so many snakes. There’s great power in that one. Her sacrifice alone should be enough for Huitzilopochtli to grant Hector immortality!”
“And what of me?”
“Don Hector will see you get what’s coming to you. But beware of failing him again!”
“My Chichimecs were to lose to his triumphant army today. And so they did. Can I be blamed if every detail isn’t exactly right?”
“Oh, yes,” the woman almost whispered.
There was a pause. “What does Hector want of me now?”
“Hold your people in check. They can continue to ravage the countryside north of here as they will. Hector will no doubt wish to lead his forces in a triumphal final battle, after he’s brought the city to heel.”
“I will try. There is great dissatisfaction after today’s huge losses. The prisoners will assuage their grief and rage for a time, but will soon be used up.”
“Then I’d advise you to concoct something extra special for the outlanders. Tell your savages they’re the witches responsible for your defeat. Use your roly-poly Holy Imbecile to twist their passions. I can’t work out every detail for you. I need to get back.”
Ryan thought about trying to snatch her as she left, or simply chill her. He dismissed the notion as soon as it entered his head. No opportunity in the ville, and as for racing back to the wag and trying to intercept her…. Though hatred for her boiled in his blood, it meant nothing in comparison to his need to save Krysty and the other companions. Payback would be sweet, but would have to wait.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“I wish our relief would get here,” Three Feather said. His name, like Two Arrow and Five Ax, was typical of the names traditionally used by the people of the valley of Mexico and its environs, or at least so far as the wretched survivors who crawled out of their caves after the end of skydark a hundred years before could make out. In his case it was unusually appropriate: he was a
mutie, a brujo or witch as the Chichimecs called his kind, who though mostly norm in appearance had a crest of three feathers of increasing length growing back to front over his skull.
“I know what you mean,” his companion said. Both were guarding the hut on the ville’s outskirts. He was a normal human, short like almost all the Chichimecs, potbellied. “I haven’t eaten all day.”
“That’s all you think about, stuffing your gut.”
“At least we have enough to eat for a while.”
Frowning, Three Feather said, “If you keep eating like you do it’s going to slow you down. Then it’s you for the pot.”
“I keep up! I ran back here as fast as you did today. Besides, if you aren’t hungry, why are you so eager to be off?”
Three Feather bobbed his head in the direction of the plaza, from which screams and applause continued to rise into the cloudless night sky. “I want to watch. Those bastards hurt us today, killed many of my friends. I want to see them get what’s coming—”
There was a strange popping sound. Something splashed against the side of the mutie’s face. “Did you spit on me?” he demanded, turning in outrage.
But his companion had collapsed on the packed dirt in front of the hut. Dark fluid was gushing from of the side of his head.
Three Feather opened his mouth to scream an alert. But what emerged from his mouth was a bloody thin tongue of steel.
“BLAZES!” DOC HAD his boot on the neck of the fallen mutie and was trying to unstick his sword from the dead sentry’s head. “It is wedged!”
“Hurry it up, Doc,” Ryan said, looking around cautiously, SIG-Sauer still ready in his hand. “It was your bright idea to poke him through the headbone.”
“Well, you must admit it dispatched him quickly and, of paramount importance, silently. There!” The blade came free with a pop. He flourished it triumphantly in the air.
They dragged the dead sentries around to the back of the hut and left them by a pile of debris. Better that passersby see no sentries at all than stiffs on the doorstep.
The door had no visible lock. With both men standing clear, Ryan pushed at it gingerly. It opened with a groan of rusted hinges that sounded horribly loud and made his heart jump into his throat.
Again, no outcries of discovery. Doc took out his flashlight and shone it inside.
A man sat in the midst of the bare floor with his knees up and his head between them. His heavy black hair was shot with gray. He raised his head and glared at them defiantly. Then as his eyes, accustomed to the dark, made out their vague figures past the dazzle, his look changed to one of surprise.
“You’re foreigners!” he exclaimed in Spanish.
“You the Holy Child’s uncle?” Ryan asked. Doc translated.
The man had gotten to his feet, slowly, as if his joints pained him. Ryan guessed he’d been sitting on the floor for many hours. His seamed badland face was impassive, but Ryan guessed he was going through a fierce internal debate.
“I am,” he said. “I am he called Raven. Have you come to kill me?”
“No. You’re free to walk out of here. But we need to talk. There’s some things you ought to know. But first we need to get out of here before somebody comes along. Will you come with us and hear us out?”
Without hesitation the older man said, “I can do that much.”
The three left the hut, moved out of the ville with more concern for speed than stealth, to a brushy lava outcrop from behind which they could keep an eye on pursuit. Unsure of the Chichimec, Ryan had no intention of leading him to their concealed wag or even betraying its existence.
Quickly he recounted the conversation he had overheard between Howling Wolf and Felicidad Mendoza. Raven squatted, listened without emotion.
“So there has been a battle. I have been imprisoned for several days. What of my nephew?”
Ryan looked at Doc, who shrugged. “He was injured. Not badly, they say. He’ll recover. I shot him. It was the only way to save myself and my friends from your army.”
For a moment Raven stared at him with eyes that glittered like glass in the starlight. “In hard times a man does what he must. It is the way of this world. If my sister’s son lives, I bear you no ill will. But what do you want of me?”
“First tell me how you got wrapped up in this.” For a fact Raven struck Ryan as a basic hunter-warrior type, a man of dignity and honor. Not the sort of crazie or dreg he’d expect to find taking part in a cannibal crusade.
“The man Nezahualcoyótl came up from the south speaking to us of destiny. He called my sister’s son a great gift of the gods, and claimed that the gods had guided him, Howling Wolf, to us to show us how to use that great gift.”
For a moment Raven sat silent. The wind had picked up. Over it Ryan could hear the demonic festivities from the ville and the deep sullen voices of the volcanoes.
“Times had turned bad. The death winds were blowing ever farther south, and the rains that strip the meat from a man’s bones. Game grew scarce. Our shadows dwindled with each sun. We should not have listened to him—I should not have listened to him—but his words were honey to our ears. I in particular was touched by destiny, he told me. For I was always the one closest to the boy. In turn I was the one the boy listened to, although in time he began to heed Howling Wolf, as well.”
He shook his head. “My heart began to turn bad almost from the start. All the torture, the eating of human flesh. If an enemy does you great hurt, you give him a hard time before he dies—that’s the way of the world, too. But Howling Wolf has a great hunger for human pain, which he has passed on to the others. All to please the gods, he preaches, but I think it is mostly what pleases him.”
“And speaking of which,” Doc said with a meaningful nod toward the wavering glow from the ville, “if we wish to avail our friends, we’d best act with expedition.”
“Um, right. Will you help us, Raven?”
“You mean no further harm to my sister’s son?”
“None unless that’s the only way to stop the invasion.”
“Removing Nezahualcoyótl will stop the invasion.”
“That’s what I reckon.”
“You will slay the false priest Howling Wolf?”
“That’s the general plan.”
“You will not try to destroy my people?”
“Don’t care about your people one way or another as long as they leave my friends and me alone. We’re probably going to have to chill a few to free our pals and put Howling Wolf on ice for keeps, though.”
“I will help you as best I can.”
“Then all that remains to us,” Doc said, “is to determine how.”
“HOW YOU HOLDING UP, Jak?” J.B. asked.
“Alive. Till dead.” The albino youth spit bloody phlegm into the dust at his feet. “Not crawl for bastards.”
“That’s the spirit. Spit in the bastards’ eyes when they come for you.” He shook his head. His face, like Jak’s, was crusted over with blood. His left eye was swollen almost shut. Improbably, his spectacles had survived, and one of their captors had placed them carefully back on J.B.’s face when the two were lashed to the poles.
“And here they come,” the Armorer said as a group led by capering blood-soaked figures started across the naked earth toward them. “Always intended, when came time for me to chill, to show whoever did me just how much guts I had. But I gotta admit, I never meant it quite so literal.”
From right behind them headlights came on, striking the pair with an almost physical impact.
“I THOUGHT,” DOC SAID with asperity as Ryan drove into the ville from the north, lights out, at a slow pace for a wag, but faster than a man could walk, “that you intended to create a diversion.”
“Circumstances changed, so the plan changed. Be pretty diverting, though.”
“Was it truly necessary to throw stealth out with the bath water?”
“Time’s blood, Doc. It’s running out fast for our friends here, and who knows
how fast for Krysty and Mildred back in the city?”
Doc rode in back. Raven was up front where Ryan could keep an eye on him. The Chichimec cradled the weapon the feathered mutie guard had carried, a nice lever-action Marlin 94 in .30-30, complete with a box and a half of cartridges for reloads. Mostly he seemed to be trying to maintain his stoic front and hide the fact he was as delighted as a kid at riding in the wag, no doubt for the first time in his life.
Doc had the other guard’s weapon, a 20-gauge Winchester Defender pump shotgun. Between Ryan and Raven rode the Mini-14 off the sentry he’d chilled at Nezahualcoyótl’s hut. The two had their handblasters in reserve, as well.
Yet again, no one paid the least attention as they rolled right up toward the plaza. They could see their friends clearly. Beyond them the games were suspended; a dozen or so Chichimecs were approaching J.B. and Jak even now. Their turn was imminent.
“We should have guessed Don Hector was never serious about fighting these crazies. Their security’s so bad he could have wiped them out any time he felt like it.”
“Which is the very fate he intends, according to that remarkably wicked young woman,” Doc said, “To make himself fully the conquering hero once he has no further use for these poor deluded fools.”
“Well,” Ryan said, “we’ll just have to piss on his parade.”
He rolled the Hummer to the edge of the plaza, barely fifteen feet behind the stakes to which his friends were tied. He switched on the lights.
The group making for the captive pair stopped, their faces frozen in comic parodies of surprise.
Ryan got out and clambered up on the wag’s hood, then helped Raven up and onto the roof. He then raised the Mini-14 above his head and fired off three quick rounds. The short-barreled longblaster made a satisfactory amount of noise.
It definitely got the undivided attention of the several hundred blood-drunk celebrants. Everybody stared; nobody moved.
