Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  Just inside the shade of the corridor on the left, a bevy of rode-hard and hefty gaudy sluts reclined on tubular aluminum chaise longues. Barefoot, in carelessly belted, ratty nylon housecoats, they were showing off their wares and airing them at the same time.

  There were no takers among the handful of scroungers loitering on the other side of the partially collapsed hallway.

  Too hot.

  Too sober.

  Or mebbe the airing was incomplete.

  Above the row of overtaxed chaises, a predark restaurant sign said Cantina Olé in red, three-dimensional letters. The “i” of the sign was a little cartoon cactus and the “O” was wearing a yellow sombrero.

  Jak leaned close to Mildred and in a deadpan voice said, “Did H fall off?”

  At first Mildred was puzzled by the question. Then she stared in amazement at the wild child. A second later she burst out laughing.

  “Nuking hell!” J.B. exclaimed, turning to the others. “Did you catch that? Jak just made a joke!”

  Although his mouth remained a thin line of implacable reserve, the albino’s ruby-red eyes seemed to glitter merrily.

  A loud scuffle and angry shouts and screams from deeper in the corridor put an abrupt end to conversation and sent hands grabbing for gun butts. From out of the darkness of the interior spilled a trio of wild-ass, go-for-broke combatants. The companions stepped clear as the herky-jerky, high-speed fist and foot fight tumbled out into the blinding sunlight of the parking lot.

  It wasn’t two against one; it was every man for himself.

  Joltheads, Ryan thought, keeping his hand on his holstered SIG-Sauer.

  The evidence for that conclusion was incontrovertible: the stringy, emaciated arms; the sagging, prematurely wrinkled skin dotted with angry sores; hair missing from the scalp in fist-size patches; the bulging, jaundiced eyes; the rotten, black-edged teeth; the clothes that looked like they’d been salvaged from a garbage dump and put through a shredder.

  And the capper was the insensate violence.

  The trio punched and kicked one another at extreme close range, spitting blood and fragments of teeth, tossing up tufts of ripped-out hair, raising clouds of dust when they fell through the mud crust on their backsides, jumping up again like they were on springs. Even though the battle was powered by a drug, there was no way human bodies could maintain the frenetic pace. After a couple of minutes of all-out combat, gasping for air, the fighters pulled black-powder handblasters out from under their clothing.

  The moment they reached for their battered revolvers, the companions unholstered their own weapons and hastily withdrew to the cover of the hallway entrance.

  Just in time.

  Point-blank, the circling joltheads started jacking back single-action hammers and pulling triggers. The revolvers click, click, clicked like castanets on misfires or unloaded or uncapped chambers—a lucky thing, since the bastards weren’t paying attention to background and potential inadvertent targets. Finally, thunderously, one of the weapons discharged, but an instant too late. Instead of coring the opposing drug fiend’s head, it powder-blackened the left side of his face from chin to receding hairline and blew a .44-caliber chunk out of his dirty earlobe.

  Three empty blasters hit the dirt and the sheathed knives came out.

  When fixed blades were drawn, everyone watching from behind hard cover stepped forward to get a better view of the festivities. Even the gaudy sluts raised themselves from the horizontal. Nobody lifted a finger to intervene in the conflict. Nobody seemed to know or care what the fight was about. Given the fact that the combatants were joltheads, the chances were good they were fighting over something imaginary.

  One of the male bystanders—a solidly built man with slicked-back, dark blond hair and an impressive, drooping-to-the-chest handlebar mustache—whipped out a harmonica. Tapping his foot to keep time, he provided a sprightly and rhythmic musical commentary on the mayhem.

  Ryan had to admit it was a sight to behold: three wild-eyed, beat-to-shit ragbags wheeling around and around, taking turns stabbing each other in the guts, groaning and squealing with every strike, blood and spittle flying in all directions. After dozens of stabs delivered and received, the action suddenly lost its momentum. Gore-drenched arms hanging limply at their sides, one by one the fighters buckled and collapsed into the fine brown dirt.

  A contest to the death had ended in a three-way draw.

  The musician crescendoed with a scale-climbing flourish, and the assembled sluts and scroungers answered with lethargic applause. It was too hot to cheer.

  Nobody moved to check the bodies for signs of life. Not even Mildred, who in a former life had sworn a Hippocratic oath.

  Joltheads were better off dead.

  As Ryan led the others past the rear of the mob of small-timer scroungers still waiting to pass through the gap between the cadaverous, 120-year-old Winnies, he could feel the gunsights up in the guard towers tracking their every step. BoomT hadn’t lasted as long as he had and built his mercantile empire by luck alone. The fat man had an animal cunning and instinct for danger. He was capable of ordering an indiscriminate preemptive strike on the entire parking lot, if he sniffed out so much as the slightest threat.

  The big-time queue had shortened considerably while they were gone. There was only one group of traders ahead of them, now. Five men bearing heavy backpacks awaited the judgment of the proprietor.

  BoomT sat in a canopied golf cart, out of sniper sight in the lee of the southernmost Winnebago’s bow. Clipped to the underside of the canopy’s frame were a pair of ComBloc RPGs, their plastic pistol grips in easy reach.

  If anything, the man was bigger than Ryan remembered. His five-hundred-pound, six-foot-eight-inch bulk took up the entire bench seat. Rolls upon rolls of pendulous, sweating flab hung from his chest. Close up, the gunshot scars on his torso and arms were clearly of varying calibers, waxy divots ranging from .380 Auto to 7.62 mm NATO. A mountainous wedge of shoulders and neck peaked at a head shaved to black stubble. Long wisps of beard hair trailed from his sloping cheeks. Instead of shoes or boots, he wore homemade sandals of tire tread. Boots his size were hard to come by.

  To protect his eyes from the sun and to conceal the focus of his attention, BoomT wore raspberry-mirror-lensed, wraparound sunglasses.

  The vast, bedspread-swaddled hipster impatiently waved his sec men forward to uncover the next batch of goods on offer. As he did so, he tossed a pale, slender rib bone onto the pile of other bones on the ground beside him. From the size of the heap it looked like he’d already eaten eight or nine of whatever the species was. He licked his fingers, one by one, and daintily wiped them on the edge of the coverlet.

  The sec men shoulder-slung their fold-stock AKMs, opened the tops of the traders’ overloaded packs and pulled out fistfuls of assorted predark fasteners. It was all salvaged nail by nail, screw by screw. It had to be. Screws and nails were no longer manufactured or imported. Without metal fasteners, building or repair of large structures was difficult, if not impossible. Without those once taken-for-granted items, folks were forced to live in tents, lean-tos, stone or log huts, or caves.

  One of the sec men approached his boss and held out the sample for examination. With a fingertip BoomT casually flicked out a few badly rusted, bent nails and stripped-slot screws. “Looks like thirty percent is useless shit,” was his verdict.

  Then he addressed the traders. “If there are rocks in your packs, I’m going to use them to sink you to the bottom of the bay. Is that understood?”

  The traders grimaced in response.

  BoomT wrote out a chit and handed the scrap of paper to the sec man with a warning. “Don’t give them this until you make sure there are no rocks.”

  The fat man shifted on the bench seat to take in the next trader in line. When he saw who was standing there, his mouth dropped open. He pushed his sunglasses down the bridge of his nose and squinted through slits for eyelids.

  “As I live and breathe, it’s
One-Eye Cawdor!” he roared. Then he looked over at J.B. and added, “And fuck me triple dead if it ain’t the Pipsqueak, too.”

  Chapter Six

  “Brought your own sluts along, I see,” BoomT said, sizing up Krysty and Mildred. “That was good thinking. Whores in these parts are scab-assed and wide-reamed. Still can’t attract no decent help around here.”

  “They’re fighters,” Ryan informed him. “They’re not sluts.”

  BoomT raised his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, okay, whatever you say, One-Eye.” Then he winked at Mildred, theatrically adjusted his crotch beneath the bedspread and blew her a kiss.

  Mildred was marksman enough to quickdraw her ZKR 551 and put a bullet through the middle of his forehead. Mebbe it would have only given him a headache. It certainly would have brought answering fire from all sides. Her expression stayed deadpan and her blaster remained in its holster.

  “So, did you hear the news about Deathlands’ famous Trader?” BoomT asked, his little black piggie eyes full of glee. “Word has it your old runnin’ buddy croaked buttugly, sitting in a warm pile of his own dung and squawling for his mammy.”

  The Port A ville entrepreneur’s chuckle was a series of rattling, glottal full-stops. Among the sec men, there were appreciative grins and snickers all around. BoomT’s enforcement crew practically worshiped him. After all, so far he was unchillable. They were terrified of him, too, and also with good reason.

  As Ryan recalled, Trader had gotten the better of BoomT in their last encounter by turning the tables and pulling a last-second double-switch. The fat man was always running a game of some kind, and it usually involved sleight of hand, like some variation on three card Monte. It wasn’t healthy to try to return bogus merchandise, either. BoomT’s customer service department was a firing squad.

  “Guess what goes around comes around,” BoomT said merrily. “You know, as righteous payback for that extry-special evil he did at Virtue Lake. All them mamas and papas, them helpless little kiddie-widdies. Chilled like gophers down a hole. You were there at Virtue Lake, right by his side, as I remember the story. Mebbe hard justice is about to bite you in your ass, too?”

  Ryan made no comment.

  “You got nothing to say on the subject, Mr. One-Eye?” BoomT prodded.

  The fat man had that right. No way was Ryan going to let himself be diverted from the task and sucked into a lopsided, losing gunfight. It was time to pull the cat out of the bag. He unslung the backpack, took out a golden, plastic-wrapped brick and underhand-tossed it over to BoomT. “We’ve got ten kilos of that,” he said. “What’ll you give us for it?”

  BoomT’s piggie eyes widened, and he sniffed at the C-4 like it was a loaf of fresh-baked bread. “If this shit really goes bang,” he said as he weighed the brick in his hand, “you can have whatever the fuck you want.” After glancing at the attached blister pack, he chucked the parcel back to Ryan. “What I want first, though, is a demo blast with that remote detonator.”

  “You got it,” Ryan said without missing a beat. Trying to read the fat man’s face was like trying to read a seventy-pound suet pudding. Although BoomT’s eyes had lit up when he recognized the explosive, that didn’t prove he had been expecting it.

  Ryan and his companions looked outwardly calm, even bored at the proceedings, but that was hardly how they felt. The radio signal trigger was indiscriminate. It was universal. Using it to fire a demonstration blasting cap would also set off the cap stuck in the booby-trapped brick in the bottom of the backpack, which would set off the plastique at their feet and turn them all from solid flesh and bone to glistening pink vapor faster than a person could blink.

  As Ryan set to work preparing the test charge, Krysty, Mildred, Doc, J.B. and Jak hunkered down in the skinny strip of shade cast by the Winnie. So far it looked like Ryan could have removed the detonators from the load without risking anything. There was no time for coulda, shoulda, woulda. After he rigged a golf-ball-size clump of C-4 with a blasting cap and radio-controlled initiator, he carried the wad of plas-ex a safe distance to the middle of the parking lot, set it down, then walked back.

  In front of BoomT he pretended to put in both of the detonator’s batteries, but expertly palmed them instead.

  Three card Monte.

  Ryan flipped off the detonator’s safety and tried the test circuit. Of course, the little green indicator light didn’t go on. “Uh, it doesn’t light up,” he said, showing the dark indicator to BoomT. “Mebbe the bulb’s burned out,” he said. “I’ll try the blast switch. Fire in the hole!”

  The sec men, traders and companions took cover, but when he hit the switch nothing happened. He tried it several times. “I guess the nukin’ thing doesn’t work. Probably none of the detonators work. That’s the breaks.”

  “Guess you’re shit out of luck, then,” BoomT said.

  “Nah, there’s still the detonator cord,” Ryan countered. “That’s the sure way to test the C-4, and there’s plenty of extra cord and blasting caps to blow up the rest of it.” He used his panga to cut off a yard length of the white braid and recrossed the parking lot. After removing the radio initiator, he crimped the blasting cap to the cord and set the safety fuse alight with a wooden match. This time he hot-footed it back to the RV.

  “Better duck and cover,” he told the others as he hurried around the front bumper.

  An instant later came the solid whack of an explosion. Even though the plastique wad was small, its power was most impressive. Not just the ear-splitting bang, either. Flying shards of dried mud rattled the far side of the Winnie and peppered the wall of the box store, turning to puffs of dust on impact. As the echoes faded, in the middle of the parking lot a cloud of pale dirt mixed with smoke climbed into the sky.

  “So, do we have a trade?” Ryan asked the entrepreneur.

  “You’d be looking for what?” the fat man said.

  “Ammo for our blasters, traveling rations, stuff we can carry.”

  “Go on inside and help yourselves,” he said, scribbling out a chit and giving it to Ryan. He waved for a sec man to take charge of the backpack, warning him, “Put that someplace safe.”

  As BoomT slipped his raspberry shades back on, Ryan turned with the companions toward the store’s entrance.

  “Wait a minute now, One-Eye,” the fat man said, “I want that bum detonator, too.”

  Ryan shrugged as if he couldn’t imagine why BoomT would want the useless piece of junk. Of course he could imagine why. The fat man either didn’t believe it was broken, or he thought he could fix it. Because it wasn’t broken, and the problem could be easily repaired, Ryan had tried to slip the thing into his pants pocket. Called out, he had no choice but to comply. “Forgot about it,” he said as he handed over the detonator.

  A dozen or so men were running toward them from the direction of the gaudy and the small-time trader queue. The guy who played harmonica was leading the pack. Ryan guessed the explosion was the most thrilling thing that had happened in Port A ville in weeks. The scroungers and loungers wanted to find out what it was all about.

  Ryan and the companions fell in line behind the sec man carrying the C-4. Behind them were two AK-armed escorts. Ryan still didn’t know for sure, but it didn’t appear that BoomT had any advance warning about the shipment of explosives. Sooner or later, however, the fat man was going to open the detonator case and find no batteries inside. Suspicious by nature, it would immediately occur to him that he’d been somehow, someway flimflammed. To confirm that, his first act would be to power up the “bum” detonator and test it for himself. The companions needed to be miles gone when that happened.

  The plate glass in the box store’s entry doors had been replaced by sheets of split and delaminating plywood. Just inside the entrance, four assault-rifle-armed sec men stood guard behind a hardened blasterpost, keeping shoppers from trying to use it as an exit. Traffic flowed one way in and one way out. It was at least ten degrees cooler than outside.

  The place was much
as Ryan remembered it from his days with Trader. Above a wide expanse of gutted floor space, the drop ceiling had long since fallen away, exposing overhead wiring, heating ducts and drooping wads of water-stained insulation. The smell was particularly hard to forget—a combination of smoke from the torches and candelabra that lit the windowless showroom, and moldy funk. Dirt-encrusted footpaths crisscrossed the gray sheet flooring, winding through an indoor junkyard. Loot pillaged from the far corners of the hellscape was piled in heaps and in neat rows. Crudely lettered signs hung from the ceiling, indicating at a distance what kind of goods were on offer in the area beneath. Wag Stuf. Tules. Cloz. Vedgies. Meet. Hardwhere.

  “Costco, post-Apocalypse,” Mildred remarked as she took it all in. “There’s even Muzak Monkees.” Somewhere out of sight a hundred-year-old audio tape was playing at top volume. Scratchy violins made violent tempo downshifts, as if the entire string section had been plunged chin-deep in a tar pit. Predark music to shop by.

  “Mildred, I do not see them,” Doc said, looking around. “Where are the monkeys? They’re playing the music?”

  “No, Mu-zak. ‘Daydream Believer.’”

  She reacted to Doc’s blank look with a curt, “Oh, never mind.”

  They followed the sec man carrying the C-4 backpack to a screened-in enclosure on the left. BoomT kept his extra-special spoils stacked behind floor-to-ceiling hurricane fence reinforced by steel pipe. A guard sitting inside on a disintegrating couch with a machine pistol on his lap had to get up and unlock the cage.

  With a sinking feeling in his gut Ryan watched the C-4 change hands. The die was cast. They couldn’t very well demand to examine the pack they’d just traded and then disarm the brick in front of witnesses. Revealing the booby trap would surely get them chilled. Ditto for starting a blaster battle inside the store to recover the goods—they didn’t have enough ammo for that.

  After the cage clanged shut, the three-man escort left them to their shopping.

  “Are we nuked, or what?” Krysty said in exasperation.