Deathlands 068: Shaking Earth

by James Axler

  “Lake’s too deep for the snorkel.”

  “Don’t have an air-breathing engine.”

  “Got air-breathing us. Too many, too long. And the problem of trying to get out under water once we get into the ville, since there ain’t very many places we can drive up onto.”

  “Excuse me,” Rino put in softly, “but what is the problem?”

  “Transport into the city itself.”

  “Ah,” he said. Then grinned. “Is no problem.”

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Ernesto, Don Tenorio’s serious young aide, died game.

  He was skinny, lacked muscle tone, and couldn’t see anything but a blur since his captors had smashed his eyeglasses. But once they slashed through the salvaged plastic clothesline that held his wrists and ankles, the very first thing he did was send one of Hector’s pet priests of Huitzilopochtli rolling down the steep sides of the ancient step-pyramid in the city’s midst with blood spewing from a broken nose, until a broken neck ended the pumping of his heart. Of course, it wasn’t easy to tell, since, as with all Nezahualcoyótl’s assistant priests, they drenched themselves in the blood of their sacrificial victims and never, ever washed it off. Needless to say, they all smelled as if they slept each night in the rectum of a week-dead elephant.

  By equally lucky accident the naked aide landed a kick directly in the crotch of an Eagle Knight trying to grab him and doubled the big man over. Don Hector, dressed up in gleaming gold and feather headdress and vestments, stood by bellowing in rage at the disruption. It was left to Felicidad Mendoza, naked but for a loincloth, a plumed headdress only slightly less ornate than Hector’s and a heavy gold necklace that didn’t do anything to hide her magnificent breasts, to step up behind the thrashing young man and stun him with a rabbit punch.

  He was still stunned when they caught his wrists and ankles, spread-eagled him atop the stone slab at the apex of the pyramid, and Don Hector, leaning over him with an obsidian knife, hacked his chest and his rib cage open and cut his heart out over his living body. Lucky him.

  The valley serfs and sec men assembled around the base of the pyramid cheered dutifully as their cacique held the heart, still steaming and pulsing, above his plumed head in offering to the sun. The hundred or so scavvies who had been rounded up by the occupying force and herded out to view the ritual watched in sullen, smoldering silence. The sun wasn’t itself putting in an appearance at Hector’s self-coronation, being hidden entirely on the far side of a leaden overcast that was thickened and deepened by smoke from the volcanoes, which were in full booming eruption.

  Don Hector, face, chest and finery liberally splashed with gore, tossed the heart into a charcoal brazier made out of an oil drum with a quarter cut out lengthwise. A cloud of reeking steam and smoke rolled out. The priests dragged the still-twitching body from the altar and pitched it down the backside of the pyramid. Hector gestured for the next sacrifice, one of the wounded captured in the infirmary, to be brought on.

  It was Felicidad’s turn to do the honors. Her eyes and lips shone as she stepped forward, knife in hand.

  “KRYSTY?” MILDRED ASKED. “Krysty, are you all right?”

  “No talk,” snarled an Eagle Knight standing guard on the same step of the pyramid as Mildred.

  “Go fuck yourself!” Mildred retorted. “You don’t dare lay a finger on us, needle dick.”

  The Eagle Knight flushed deep red and started to raise his laser arm. Then he lowered it and turned away. The black woman was right. He didn’t dare risk damaging the guests of honor at his cacique’s inaugural bash as Emperor of the Valley.

  “Krysty?” she said to the white-clad woman.

  The redhead turned to look over her shoulder at Mildred. The first thing Mildred saw was how pale Krysty’s face was; the second, the way the sweat ran down it in gleaming sheets. The day was warm and unusually humid for the valley, under all these clouds, but neither that nor the climb two-thirds up the pyramid was enough to make her perspire that heavily. The emerald-green eyes were unnaturally bright. The physician worried her fever had come back.

  Then Krysty smiled.

  The pyramid trembled beneath the soles of Mildred’s bare feet.

  CUTTING OUT HEARTS with a stone knife wasn’t as easy as it sounded. After he had done three and Felicidad had done three, Don Hector called a water break.

  He went to the side of the pyramid top, where one of those picnic tables with a parasol sprouting from the middle of it had been erected. It wasn’t exactly traditional, but who knew there wasn’t going to be sun today? The cacique knew that he and his chosen consort would need breaks. Also he didn’t want his extra-special guest to pass out from sunstroke before he had watched all his loyal retainers, and his foreign female guests, offered to the gods.

  Don Tenorio had to be fresh for when his turn came. The gods didn’t want any wilted lettuce.

  “You seem to have flooded the city with all your forces and some of your citizens,” Tenorio said when Hector joined him under the parasol. As were Krysty and Mildred, the alcade was clad in a lightweight robe made out of salvaged bedsheets. He wasn’t bound.

  “Not all. Still, the ceremony is much more appropriate for the presence of an enthusiastic throng, don’t you think? Your people are as yet unwilling to cooperate, so I was forced to import a throng.”

  “What if the Chichimecs choose to attack your domain?”

  Hector laughed expansively. “I have no fears. I controlled the Chichimecs all along. Nezahualcoyótl was my agent from the outset. I sent him among them, first to confirm reports of the Holy Child, then to manipulate the child and, through him, all of them.”

  Tenorio stared at him. “Why?” he managed to ask above the synthetic cheering of the sec men and the growing noise of eruption.

  “To achieve my destiny I needed a united valley. How better to attain that than manufacture a menace? I could at once crush my foes and demonstrate to the scattered peoples of the valley that only by pulling together under my protection could they be saved.”

  The cacique took a swig from a blue plastic sippy bottle bearing the logo of El Instituto Atlético Blue Demon, a legendary predark martial arts studio. He held it out to Tenorio.

  “Water?”

  THE STRUCTURAL STEEL BONES of the building groaned as the half skyscraper shook around them. The Jaguar Knights paused and glanced up as dust and flecks of insulation drifted down from the ceiling.

  Ryan felt his face muscles go taut. He remembered reading in a book once about quake swarms. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear things were building up to a major bone-shaker.

  He looked back at Doc; the older man’s eyes were wide.

  He, Doc and three Jaguar Knights were exiting a stairwell onto the eighth floor of a building that once had more than twenty and now didn’t run past eleven. It should put him on a level just a bit higher than the top of the pyramid three hundred yards away. Also this level had no windows intact on the side facing the plaza. It was primo sniper turf, and had been picked accordingly.

  For that same reason Hector or his sec boss may have thought to secure it. They deployed into a line abreast with a Jaguar Knight armed with an MP-5 on Ryan’s right, Doc with his LeMat to Ryan’s left, and to his left the other two scavvies, one carrying a second MP-5, the other a big SPAS 12-gauge riot scattergun that could fire either semiauto or pump action.

  The level had been an office. Everything of obvious value had long since been salvaged. There were still a few desks, too bulky, heavy and common to be worth salvaging for anything but their metal, and fiberboard dividers, chest-high on Ryan and shoulder-high on most of the scavvie commandos, that still partitioned the big room into rows of workstations. The line moved forward quietly but quickly. The sun was up and, from the roar of the crowd outside, the party had begun.

  They had crossed halfway to the warm breeze blowing in the wall-size opening where the glass had gone, that already smelled of hot blood and burned hu
man flesh, when a figure popped up from behind a cubicle. Before even snake-fast Ryan could react, a brilliant ruby lance stabbed out.

  AN UNEASY MURMUR ran through the audience, whose backs were to the men skulking in the shadows of the office building’s ground floor. “Now I really don’t like it,” J.B. muttered. “These valley Mexes don’t usually bother to notice your little old seismic disturbances unless the earth opens up at their feet or there’s lava seepin’ under the door or something.”

  “Tighten up,” Jak whispered fiercely from the Armorer’s right. J.B. glared at him. He just grinned back.

  There had been a pair of sec men stationed in the lobby, who had been much preoccupied elbowing each other and grinning at the swell spectacle of people having their bodies carved open and their hearts yanked out. They now lay in spreading pools of blood with flies crawling on their eyeballs, grinning through second mouths. The Jaguar Knights understood the making and use of garrotes, a fine, strong wire strung between two wooden handles. A loop rolled over the victim’s head from behind, a knee in the small of the back, the handles yanked to the sides with savage force. Properly done, the garrote didn’t choke, it cut. The two jokers had had their throats severed to the spine before they’d known what had hit them.

  J.B., Jak and the other three Jaguar Knights, including Rino Espinoza, were poised to drive through the crowd to try to rescue Krysty and Mildred when Ryan opened the ball. It would have been more feasible had they actually been able to work their way closer; they couldn’t. J.B. and Jak were small enough not to stand out among the locals, but their pale skins would give them away at once. Since there weren’t any guys out there wearing hoods, mingling was out of the question.

  So all they could do was hunker down and wait. They and Ryan both had talkies, although whether they’d work or not was a crapshoot, what with all the structural steel around and the lightning that was beginning to crackle through the threatening clouds overhead. One way or another, when the time came they’d rush out and just hose their way through the crowd to the pyramid. Jak still carried the autoloading shotgun taken off the dead Chichimec and these Knights also packed two subguns and a scattergun among them. For his part, J.B. reckoned his borrowed BAR would prove to be an excellent people mover.

  In case it didn’t work he had both his Uzi and his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun strapped to the overstuffed rucksack on his back. They had made a quick trip by Tenorio’s HQ to collect their effects, efficiently and without loss, murdering a skeleton crew of Hector’s sec men in passing. The Armorer even had Mildred’s ZKR 551 handblaster and her personal effects stuffed into the backpack.

  A bang made J.B. jump. He realized it was a gren going off overhead and not the building coming down on their heads, and relaxed slightly. Then it hit him: it was a gren, going off overhead…

  “Trouble,” Jak whispered.

  “No shit.” There was nothing to do but wait until they got the signal to move.

  Or until they decided the others had been taken out and it was up to them to do or die.

  THE JAGUAR KNIGHT to Doc’s left went flying backward, flung in a way no bullet could accomplish by the explosive jetting of flash-boiled blood from his chest. His MP-5 chattered deafeningly, stitching a ragged line in the acoustic tiles overhead.

  The Eagle Knight had prudently dropped out of sight the instant he had fired. No targets presented themselves.

  With stealth off the table, the four survivors pulled frag grens from their pockets or belts, yanked the pins and tossed the bombs. A ripple of bangs and flashes answered, followed by wild shrieks.

  As soon as he let his gren fly, the Jag to Ryan’s right crab-walked rapidly to the right side of the room and then ran forward with his machine pistol shouldered. The other just jumped up onto the workstations and began jumping from row to row over the tops of the dividers, his combat scattergun at his shoulder, as well.

  The Eagle Knight sprang up, quick but unsteady on his bare muscular legs. Blood poured from the black pit where his right eye had been. He raised his right arm. The laser flared and cracked.

  It drew a line of ionization harmlessly past the charging Jaguar Knight and blasted a chunk of tile flaming down from the ceiling. The Jag shot him right in the chest armor. Two pellets, low, punched neat little holes in his opposite number’s six-pack stomach.

  The half-blinded Eagle Knight staggered backward a step. The Jaguar Knight jumped down and fired another shot into the chest protector. Ryan, moving forward more cautiously with his Steyr ready, wondered if the Jag had panicked. If he shifted his aim a few degrees up or down, he’d chill the bastard now.

  The Jaguar Knight blasted out three more quick shots, scouring the molded plastic away from the curved steel-ceramic plate, which was the real armor. Each shot hammered the Eagle Knight another step backward—the last into open air. As he vanished with a wild scream, Ryan understood.

  A sec man popped up like a prairie dog, aiming an M-1 carbine at the scattergunner. Doc happened to be right across the divider from him. The blast of the shorty shotgun barrel on his handblaster tore the front off the man’s head and set fire to what was left. The man fell thrashing like a speared trout.

  Then the other Jaguar Knight was at the last line of cubicles, firing quick bursts from the flank into whatever sec men were left functioning. Ryan ran forward to take up shooting position in the open-window wall. The building was shaking again, not stopping this time, and the sky outside seemed to be growing darker. He ignored it. He reached the edge, just had time to note with mingled fury and relief the unmistakable form of Krysty standing atop the pyramid and Mildred’s shorter form upright beside her.

  Then a flash lit the faces of the buildings to his left.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty

  The top of the pyramid was shaking as if about to fall right out from under the gathering at the very top. The rumbling from the volcanoes was much louder than the roar of the crowd. The priests’ eyes were starting to roll inside their blood-caked faces, but Hector and Felicidad didn’t seem to notice. Nothing was going to spoil the occasion for them.

  A woman approached Mildred, who had been held ten feet back from Krysty as the redhead was escorted to take her turn on the altar. The woman was wearing only a loincloth and a gold headdress that was quite modest by the standards of what Hector and Felicidad were sporting, and of course a liberal coating of lots of other people’s blood. Only when she came quite close, walking carefully to keep from sliding in the blood that covered the whole top of the pyramid and dripped away down the steps, did Mildred recognize María Garza, Don Tenorio’s housekeeper.

  She held an obsidian knife in her hand. Mildred felt her flesh shrink from the black blade, then realized she wasn’t going to cut her.

  “I see you know me,” the tiny woman hissed in English. “Does it surprise you? You did not know I spoke your dog’s tongue.”

  She moved behind Mildred and cut the ropes that bound her wrists. Mildred winced as she felt the superfine edge slice the skin of her left wrist.

  “It was I who gave the yerba mala to your witch friend,” María said, voice dripping with malevolence and joy. “I myself let Don Hector and his men into Tenorio’s residence. The fool never suspected!”

  She rose on tiptoe to speak into Mildred’s ear. “And my reward will be…eternal life!”

  “You got that wrong, bitch,” Mildred said, and smashed her elbow into the woman’s face.

  THE EAGLE KNIGHTS holding Krysty by either elbow released her gingerly and stepped quickly to the sides. Her sentient hair was moving like a nest of serpents, and there seemed to be a crackling in the air around her that neither one liked. She was left alone, facing Hector with her head down and her wrists bound in front of her.

  Felicidad stepped up behind her with a macahuitl. She drew the weapon down the back of the flimsy white robe, parting it. She pressed maliciously hard enough to draw a welling crimson line down the white skin of Krysty’s back.
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  “You seem very calm, señorita,” Felicidad said tauntingly. “Don’t you realize what’s happening to you?”

  Then she fell back a step and gasped. Before her eyes the cut she had made on Krysty’s back from nape to tailbone sealed itself like a zipper closing.

  Krysty raised her head. Don Hector looked not into two green eyes, but blazing miniature suns.

  MARÍA STAGGERED back. With surprising speed, Mildred whirled, grabbed her knife wrist, then stepped past her, twisting the arm up behind the traitor’s bare back. She gave the arm a cruel yank. María squealed and dropped the volcanic glass knife.

  Mildred expected at any instant to be blasted to barbecued back ribs by lasers, or chopped to bits, or clubbed unconscious, or any other bad thing she could think of. She didn’t care. She was on a roll, with an unexpectedly golden opportunity to get at least something back for herself, for Krysty, for their murdered companions.

  She slid her free arm around the local woman’s throat, let go of her wrist, then with the hand freed up, seized the wrist of her own arm. She heaved her shoulders with all her strength.

  María squealed shrilly, then her neck broke. It felt and sounded like the breaking of a tree limb. The traitor went limp in Mildred’s arms.

  As she let the deadweight go, Mildred realized no one was paying attention to her. All eyes were on Krysty.

  SHE BEGAN TO STRAIN at the leather cords that bound her wrists. The muscles of her shoulders and back and arms seemed to swell to inhuman dimension. The shaking of the earth grew and grew.

  The sky to the south lit with an orange flash.

  The woman threw back her head and roared as her bonds parted.

  Don Hector pissed down his legs.

  Felicidad Mendoza was made of sterner stuff. With a wild cry, she leaped for Krysty’s back, macahuitl upraised to split her skull.

  The crack of the explosion that had opened a gaping hole in the side of Popocatépetl reached the plaza. Felicidad dropped the weapon and covered her ears against the terrific tsunami of noise.