by James Axler
With all the immense dignity of which he was capable, employing his again-sheathed swordstick with a grand flourish, Doc marched forward to the torture poles. He pulled out his pocketknife and slashed the bonds of first J.B., then Jak.
Both men dropped to their knees, groaning with the aches and pins-and-needles agony that flowed with blood back into their arms and hands. “What took…long?” Jak demanded.
“Never thought I’d want to kiss that mug of yours, Doc,” J.B. said, rubbing his wrists and getting one knee up.
“Keep your expressions of gratitude in abeyance, John Barrymore. We are not out of the woods yet.”
The Armorer nodded to the execution squad, which still stood frozen sixty feet away. “Yeah, we are.”
Jak got to his feet, reached out a hand to help J.B. up. They limped together back toward the wag as Doc stood facing down the mob with sheer presence.
Through all this, Raven stood like a clay statue atop the Hummer, arms folded, Marlin jutting at an angle from one hand. As the two freed captives approached, he tossed the longblaster toward J.B. Though his hands felt like vast pincushions, the Armorer fielded the weapon without dropping it.
Raven raised his arms above his head. “People!” he shouted. “You know me. I am Raven, uncle to the Holy Child.” Or so Ryan reckoned, based on the smattering of Spanish he’d of necessity absorbed the past week and what he’d have said under the circumstances. The Chichimecs gaped at the man.
Doc turned grandly on his heel and strode back to the wag. “Shotgun, Jak,” he said out of the corner of his mouth. The white-haired youth nodded and took up the Defender the older man had left leaning against the Hummer’s front left tire. Doc walked to cover the right side of the wag. As he turned back to face the mob, he drew his bulky LeMat as discreetly as possible, held it down by his trouser leg.
As Ryan had anticipated—bet his life and those of his friends, to be more precise—the prestige of the Holy Child’s uncle and guardian was sufficient to hold the mob back and win him a listen. His speechifying had long since outstripped Ryan’s comprehension, but it seemed to be making an impression.
“He is displaying oratorical skills of an unlooked-for degree of advancement,” Doc said admiringly. “Would you like me to translate?”
“He keepin’ to the script?”
“Substantially, yes.”
“Then no.”
Of course, the spell couldn’t last. A strapping mutie pushed to the head of the mob. He was broad-shouldered, thick-muscled, with a fist of cartilage for what passed as a face. Ryan had seen him helping supervise the evisceration of the prisoners, and guessed he was one of Nezahualcoyótl’s chief enforcers. He raised his massive arms above his head and began to bellow at the crowd, for all the world like a common everyday Deathlands sec goon bullying the masses.
“He says, ‘Do not listen to this traitor, his head and heart have grown soft, he has turned his face from the gods, only Nezahualcoyótl knows the heart of the Holy Child,’ so on, so forth,” Doc translated in a monotone.
“Right.” Ryan whipped the Mini-14 to his shoulder, centered the mutie’s head in the peep rear sight, squeezed off a round. The carbine might have been loaded with some kind of soft or even hollow-pointed hunting rounds—Ryan hadn’t bothered to check beyond insuring it had a full mag and one up the spout—because the mutie boss’s head popped like a zit. He fell right over backward in the dust with his arms still rhetorically upflung and the last convulsive clench of his heart ejaculating blood from his lower jaw and neck stump.
“Ryan!” Doc exclaimed.
“We ain’t here for debate, Doc.”
Doc eyed the crowd with eyes like boiled onions. “Surely that was a touch precipitous?”
But the Chichimecs, having watched the spurting corpse drop with avid interest, had turned their collective eyes back to the small man with the silvered hair who stood atop the wag. “It’s results I’m interested in,” Ryan said.
“Think about it, Doc,” J.B. said. “Do you really want our fate decided by democratic processes among cannies?”
But Jak swore bitterly. “Fuck, Ryan. Wanted that one!”
“Uh-oh,” J.B. said. “We got company.”
From the street to their right appeared a wedge of big Chichimecs carrying blasters and flame-streaming torches. Behind them came several of the blooddrenched men, wearing things that looked like shiny shower caps on their heads. Finally came Nezahualcoyótl himself, stalking more like a big cat than one of his namesakes.
Ryan had to admit the old devil was cool as concrete in a Laska midwinter. He’d not just gathered his chillers around him but had rounded up torches for them to tote, to make his appearance that much more impressive.
J.B. raised the Marlin. “This one’s mine.”
Ryan held his hand out to stop him. “No. We can’t chill him. Watch the mob and the main man’s hitters. If they look like they’re thinking about moving on Raven or us, chill them. But if we drop the Wolf, the mob eats us.”
J.B. gave him a “hope you know what you’re doin’” frown, but lowered the wep.
The prophet’s procession marched into the middle of the open space, which still separated his followers from the interlopers. Turning his back on the wag, he began to address the crowd in a shrill, piercing voice. The bloody men screeched approval and reinforcement at what were apparently key utterances.
“What’s with those crazies?” Ryan asked. He held the Mini-14 gingerly, not aimed, but pointed and ready to raise and snap off a shot. This was the tricky point.
“Priests.” Jak spat.
“They added little details to the fun,” J.B. said. “Like cutting one dude’s man parts off and shoving them down his throat before they pulled the guts out of him.”
“By Jove, I believe those are human heart cauls they’re wearing on their heads!’ exclaimed Doc. “Just as Prescott described the ancient Aztecs as doing.”
“If you mean a kind of membrane bag your heart comes in,” J.B. said in a guttural voice, “you got that right. Fresh cut.”
The Chichimecs were starting to rumble deep in their throats, a sound like the noise of the smokies away off to the far side of the lake, but under the circumstances far more menacing.
“What’s he saying, Doc?” Ryan demanded.
“The expected. He alone is the prophet, sent by the gods to aid the Holy Child. Raven is a heretic rebel and must die.”
A snarl issued from the throats of the mob. “Ah,” Doc said in dismay. “He just told them Raven has disgraced himself by making common cause with the very infidel who struck down the Holy Child. He scored points with that one, I very much fear.”
The priests began to dance in front of Nezahualcoyótl, chanting shrilly.
“They say, ‘Take their hearts, their hearts to the gods, their blood for the blood of the Holy Child,’” Doc said.
First one Chichimec took up the chant, then another. Suddenly the whole mob was chanting along with the capering priests.
It began to surge forward.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“What is our plan now, Ryan?” Doc asked.
Ryan shouldered the Mini-14. “We get ready to die a lot.”
The crowd stopped. Silence fell like a hundred-ton nukeproof door.
A short figure limped painfully into the glare of bonfire and torches. A large round head propped atop a near-spherical body, one pudgy pasty arm pressed to a poultice taped onto the side of its vast belly.
“¡El Niño Santo!” the horde gasped.
“¡Mira!” cried Howling Wolf. Ryan understood it to mean “Behold!”
The boy raised the arm that wasn’t clutching his gut wound. He pointed a chubby finger at the tall gaunt figure in the wolf’s head.
The prophet sensed his luck had just caught the last train for the coast. “¡Mátalo!” he screamed. Slay him!
The big bastard turned and drew down on the boy with his Browning autoloading sca
ttergun. Ryan already had the Ruger aimed. He fired three quick shots into the muscle-sheathed rib cage beneath the massive right arm. The mutie went down trailing blood from nose slits and mouth.
Howling like coyotes, the crowd charged. They swarmed up the big torch-bearing guards like soldier ants, tearing, biting. Several of the bodyguards blasted full-auto bursts into the crowd. It didn’t win them so much as a second.
The priests shrieked in terror and turned to run. Most were taken at once, disappeared under flailing limbs. The Chichimecs who had weps seemed to be disregarding them in favor of the equipment nature had gifted them with. A couple of the priests broke away to be hunted through the ville by baying packs of Chichimecs.
For a moment Nezahualcoyótl stood alone, with a sea of humanity and near-humanity surging around him like surf. His eyes blazed forth from a face streaked with other men’s blood. Later Ryan decided he simply couldn’t believe that everything had deteriorated so quickly for him.
For a moment, though, it seemed as if he would repel the horde now lusting—with the Holy Child’s guidance—for his blood by sheer force of personality. Then a muzzled mutie leaped on his back and, leaning forward, ripped away the whole of Nezahualcoyótl’s right cheek with his fangs.
The prophet became the nucleus of a hill of writhing figures. Horrific screams emerged from the midst of it, and jets of blood. Slowly the mound dwindled toward the hard-packed soil.
Then the struggling ceased. The mob fell back, humans and muties alike looking as if they had bathed in fresh blood. In the space they suddenly cleared, nothing remained but a blood-soaked wolf’s hide and a crimsondyed skeleton clothed in a few rags of skin and meat.
Ignoring the commotion, Raven had scrambled down from the wag and run to his nephew’s side. The Holy Child turned to him, tears streaming down his great pallid moon of a face, and collapsed into the older man’s arms.
Doc tucked away his LeMat, took up his swordstick from where he’d leaned it against the wag, and brushed at his coat. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “it appears our work here is done.”
RYAN DROVE THE WAG south as fast as he could. He was no longer concerned about running with lights on. With Nezahualcoyótl eaten alive by his followers, the Holy Child was in complete control of the Chichimec horde. Which meant in practice his uncle Raven was. Raven had no further appetite for war, and likely enough none of the Chichimecs did, either.
The old man had asked Ryan, just before the reunited companions left, what they could do. Their own homeland still faced devastation from the storms. There were fewer mouths to feed, to be sure, but that would only put off the day of reckoning.
“I have no idea,” Ryan admitted. If they rescued Tenorio, he’d at least agree to trade with the Chichimecs, maybe even send them aid. Whether he could do enough was beyond Ryan’s knowledge, and he was damned thankful it was also not his problem.
If Hector won, well, the Chichimecs would be on their own lookout. And Ryan and company would be beyond worrying about it.
They had recovered Ryan’s SSG rifle, as well as Jak’s and J.B.’s weps, including the BAR lent them by Tenorio. The items had been stashed in a back room of the late Nezahualcoyótl’s hut, apparently as trophies. The M-60 was missing and nobody admitted having any idea where it was; no doubt one of the raiders who had kidnapped J.B. and Jak had “lost” it as too damned heavy to tote back to the ville on foot.
Ryan had halfway hoped to find a plundered talkie or two. Now that they hadn’t, he didn’t regret it. Hector would no doubt have the radio freaks monitored.
One thing they had made Raven promise, which he had been glad to do: nobody was to leave the Chichimec-held ville before dawn. Hector would be assuming that all the outlanders, save the two women he held captive, had long since bought the farm. Ryan didn’t want anything disabusing him of that notion before a 180-grain, copper-jacketed bullet tunneled through the back of his skull.
They made for the main city camp, which as far as they or the Chichimecs knew, remained undisturbed and blissfully unaware anything was amiss. Ryan surmised Hector would try to secure the city, or at least a firm foothold, and then challenge the scavvies to pry him out, rather than risk an all-out battle in the open between the encamped forces. Even at his most manic, Ryan judged, Hector had to know the scavvies would whip his boys in a stand-up fight, outnumbered as they were.
Of course, Ryan understood he had piled surmise upon supposition, as Doc might put it. It might be bullshit on bullshit. Well, it was still his best guess, and his best play. If he was wrong, they’d all be taking a trip a lot farther south than anticipated….
All the same, he slowed and killed the lights when they started to approach the two camps. He drove up to just shy of the crest of what he judged to be the last rise before coming in sight of the scavvies camp and stopped. Leaving the Armorer where he was, in the gun mount with his automatic rifle, Ryan and Jak exited the wag and crawled up to the top for a look.
“Strike,” Ryan said, scanning the camp with his monocular. The fires had been allowed to gutter low, but he could see forms sleeping peacefully with blasters stacked nearby. A yawning sentry wandered among them with a long FN FAL slung at waist height by a sling.
So as not to rouse the valley camp, slumbering a half mile or so off to the west, Ryan ran down on the scavvies with lights out, flashing them once as they approached the outskirts to alert the sentries and to let them know nobody was trying to sneak up on them. All the same the scavvie sentries were pointing their weapons at the wag when it rolled in among them. Only when they recognized the occupants did they relax.
It helped that they had taken time to wash up quickly before departing the ville—not just Jak and J.B. but Ryan, whose head wound had broken open, although the blood had run down over his patch rather than into his good eye so that he was unaware of it. As anxious as Ryan was to rescue Krysty and Mildred, Felicidad Mendoza had said they were to be sacrificed, and that meant that nothing would happen to them before sunup at the very earliest. According to J.B., sunrise was still two and a half hours away when they rolled out of the ville under gathering clouds.
The scavvies were startled to see the companions appearing out of the north. The first thing Ryan told them was to spread the word not to show any lights or unusual activity. Only when the puzzled but agreeable scavvies had begun to comply did he and his friends start to tell the tale.
It took a lot more jawing—and time—than he was comfortable with to get them to comprehend all that had gone on, much less believe it. Fortunately no voices were raised and the wakened scavvies mostly kept to their bedrolls as requested. They lacked most semblance of military discipline, but their lifestyle demanded a great deal of self-discipline. And after yesterday Ryan could do no wrong in any of their eyes.
He needed all that, not just respect but hero-worship, first to get them to accept the incredible story, then to talk them out of mounting up right then, falling on the racked-out valley forces, and massacring them in their own beds.
“Not necessary,” Ryan insisted. “They aren’t that different from the Chichimecs. If we take out Hector, they won’t fight with you on their own hook.”
Colonel Obiedo, the nominal tactical commander had been on the firing line with a blaster-wag and died of anaphylactic shock, stung to death by yellowjackets whose rage had been stirred and then directed by the Holy Child. Current war chief apart from Ryan himself was the ranking surviving Jaguar Knight, a gangly mustached young man named Rino Espinoza. Fortunately he spoke English, and he had the quick and tactical mind Ryan had come to associate with Tenorio’s self-constituted elite commandos. Once he accepted the bizarre tale was true, he agreed with all Ryan’s reasoning.
He also agreed that the city forces should, as stealthily as possible, march down and secure the shore end of the causeway. If, as Ryan guessed, Hector had captured it, four Jaguar Knights would lead the attack and take out the guards quietly if they could. If snooping and pooping failed, the
y still had grens left over and even a couple satchel charges. Whatever it took, they’d grab the causeway entrance and dig in around it to prevent Hector bringing any more troops into the city than he had already.
“Risky,” J.B. pointed out in a quiet aside. “If a firefight breaks out, no way Hector isn’t going to find out about it.”
“What’s he going to think?” Ryan asked. “He knows we’re dead. The natural assumption is the scavvies’ve learned he grabbed the roadhead. He won’t let that spoil his shivaree.”
The Armorer shrugged eloquently. “Yeah, I know,” Ryan admitted. “Still more assumptions. But if any of them are wrong, we’re chilled anyhow. I’d rather die on my feet than my knees.”
J.B. sighed. “Amen to that.”
From the south came a series of booming cracks. Past the dark drowned towers of the city, the southern horizon glowed red like the mouth of a forge.
“Don’t like the looks or sound of that,” the Armorer said. “Sounds like very angry smokies. Mebbe angry enough to dump another three, four feet of hot ash and poison gas on our sorry heads.”
As if to emphasize his words, the earth shivered beneath their feet, like the flank of a horse that’s had a fly light on it. Ryan shrugged. “Least of our worries right now.”
Espinoza emerged from a nearby tent. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Say what?” Ryan asked.
Five other men emerged from the tent, armed, with their faces blackened. Despite the war paint Ryan recognized the other surviving Jaguar Knights who had remained with the forces in the field rather than returning to town with their alcade.
“We’re coming with you,” Rino announced.
Ryan looked to J.B. “Be a tight fit in the wag,” he said, “but I think these boys could’ve ridden with Trader.”
It was the Armorer’s seal of approval. “Reckon you’re right,” Ryan said. “But we’ve still got the problem of getting into the city.”
“We got the sealing plates stowed. I checked. Cannies never found the compartment. We can make her airtight and run on the bottom.”
