Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  Imagine june bugs caught between concrete and the head of a ball-peen hammer.

  In midstride, the indentured servants were driven face-first into the ground by man-made meteors. The weight, speed and mass of the projectiles blew out the sides of their rib cages, pulverized their skulls and sent aerosolized guts, brains and marrow flying in all directions.

  In the next instant, a chunk of concrete block wall slammed into the trailer, crashing completely through it.

  BoomT managed to get the golf cart in gear and moving. Cranking over the steering tiller, he bid the suddenly worthless cover adieu. Accelerator pedal floored, head lowered, he sped off, following the sidewalk south. His sec men ran after him.

  Until he circled out of the choking dust plume, he had no idea what had happened, what he had in fact done. As he took in his former domain, he couldn’t recognize it.

  It took a moment for the truth to sink in.

  Sure enough, there was a crater big enough for a swimming pool.

  That vacant hole, still belching smoke, was his entire net worth.

  Everything BoomT had worked and fought for his whole life—his magnificent edifice to post-Apocalyptic commerce, its stock of previously owned merchandise, the contents of his treasure room, his devoted sec crew, his gaudy, his assemblage of willing if less than appetizing whores—was obliterated. In its place was more fire and more smoke than he had ever seen. Towering flames danced behind the shifting wall of dust. The vast, roiling smoke column had risen a thousand feet in the air and was still climbing.

  Worst of all, the direct connection between the excavation of the swimming pool and his total ruination was impossible to ignore. BoomT had been hornswoggled into pushing the button that brought his empire to an end.

  He’d been rogered in a way that Deathlands’ legends were made of.

  Legends that never died.

  That he knew just got bigger and bigger, over time.

  “Look over there! Radblazes, somebody made it out alive!” one of the sec men shouted, gesturing toward the end of the south parking lot as he passed BoomT a pair of full-size binoculars.

  The entrepreneur peered through the optics. Better than a mile away, a handful of people stood on the edge of the golf course, staring back at the destruction. Even at that distance, BoomT could make out what looked like a black eye patch on one of them; the red-haired slut and the sawed-off little turd in the fedora were much easier to see. There was no mistaking who it was.

  Or who had engineered his demise.

  “One-Eye,” he growled. Even as he spoke, Ryan and his crew turned tail and ran to get out from under the falling debris.

  It was too late for BoomT’s sec men to bracket them with blasterfire.

  And besides, the sec men had their own concerns about being struck by objects dropping out of the sky. The relatively lighter stuff had been thrown higher by the blast. It took a lot longer to reach apogee and reverse course. And all of a sudden it was raining down around them. Some of the junk was the size and weight of cast-iron pipe fittings; some of it was three feet long, pointy and sharp.

  Before the entrepreneur could order a retreat, one of his crew was struck from above, and the force of the blow dropped the sec man instantly to his knees. The end of a length of rebar angled up from his left collarbone and the steel rod’s tip poked out through the middle of his right buttock. His innards were skewered crossways. Blood gushed from the dying man’s mouth as he tried to speak.

  BoomT stomped the accelerator, cutting the tiller arm over hard, swerving away from the gurgling horror. With debris bouncing off the ground on either side of him, he made a beeline for a perpendicular street and rumbled up onto the sidewalk. When he was out of range, he stopped the cart and let his men catch up.

  He knew where One-Eye was heading. In that direction there was only one place to go. Cawdor and crew were making for the ships tied up at the crane. A getaway by sea. BoomT realized he could still cut them off and keep them from escaping. If they didn’t die in the ensuing gun battle, if they were taken prisoner, he would have his revenge, and it would be mythic.

  It would have to be to make up for his loss of face.

  What Trader had done to him so many years ago had been bad, so bad that the story of his hosing still circulated, still tainted his reputation, but this was a defeat of an entirely different order of magnitude. This was a total wipe-out. An extermination.

  But why?

  BoomT racked his brain for an answer that made sense. There was no material gain for Cawdor that he could see. One-Eye hadn’t plundered the treasure room. If he’d tried, the guards posted there would have responded with bullets and a major firefight would have ensued. The fat man had come away holding the shitty end of the stick in his final deal with Trader, so there was no reason for One-Eye to risk his life and the lives of his crew to get payback. If there was payback due, it was BoomT’s to collect.

  His mention of Trader’s death had been a test. He had held back critical details of the story, to try to find out what Cawdor knew. For years BoomT had been spreading rumors about being in the room with Trader in his last helpless moments, sometimes implying that he had hastened the legend’s departure with his own two butt cheeks. The tales were complete fabrications, of course; they were intended to restore his lost status and prestige. The fat man hated to be bested, and since Trader had disappeared without a trace, there was no one to question him on the facts.

  Unfortunately there was no one to refute them, either. Which was something that hadn’t occurred to him until now.

  It occurred to BoomT that he had been punished for the crime of running off his mouth.

  And the punishment meted out was inconceivable.

  Why were Cawdor and Pipsqueak hauling ass for the moored ships? That one was easy to answer—in case BoomT had somehow miraculously escaped.

  His sec men joined him, coughing, sweat streaking the soot that covered their faces. The whites of their eyes were scoured pink from dust and ash. BoomT was down to five soldiers. Cawdor had six. An even match, except in firepower. His sec crew was armed with automatic weapons and extra mags.

  “The scum who did this to us are headed for the water,” he told his troops. “No way are they getting away with this. We’re going to stop them from sailing out of here, no matter what it takes. Follow me.”

  With a whir of the cart’s electric motor, BoomT accelerated away and his sec men fell in line behind. He kept his speed down, fearing his escort would either fall too far back to be of any use or faint dead away from exertion in the sweltering heat. His own massive, sweat-lubed buttocks were sliding around on the vinyl bench seat. Even though he was driving parallel to the golf course, he couldn’t see the opposition. That was a good thing. If he couldn’t see Cawdor, chances were Cawdor couldn’t see him.

  BoomT already had a plan in place to stop an attempted escape by sea; a plan he had devised after the Trader deal gone bad. Because of the sunken tankers at the upper end of the Port A ville moorage, the only way in—from the south—was also the only way out for deep-keel vessels. That meant exit and entry could be blocked off in a matter of minutes, keeping robbers and cheats from reaching the open Gulf, and stopping would-be robbers from invading the moorage.

  He was two-thirds of the way past the golf course when he saw a column of sec men running his way. He sped up to meet them.

  The troopers were visibly relieved to find their boss still not-chilled.

  BoomT was less sanguine about seeing their faces. His first question was addressed to the bald guy in charge of harbor security. “Why did you desert your posts?”

  “To help with the rescue,” the sec man said. “We thought you’d need help to get out the wounded.”

  “We’re all that’s left,” BoomT informed him. “There’s no one else to rescue. Everybody was blown to bits. The emporium is gone, too. Hell, the whole damn mall is gone.”

  The sec men were struck mute by the news.

 
“Did you see a man with an eye patch?” BoomT demanded. “A stumpy little shit was with him, and a tall slut with red hair.”

  “Yeah, we passed them on the way up,” the head sec man said. “Six strangers. And Captain Tom was with them.”

  “They were the ones who did it, you droolies,” the fat man said. “They destroyed everything we had, and you let them go.”

  Blood drained from the sec men’s faces.

  They were thinking firing squad. And this time they were going to be the shootees instead of the shooters.

  The sailors looked plenty worried, too. They backed away from the sec men, hands in plain sight and nowhere near their waistband-tucked blasters. Their body language said, This has nothing to do with us. Not our responsibility. It said volunteering for the rescue team was looking more and more like a mistake.

  “We’ve got them outnumbered,” BoomT said, the collective pronoun taking summary execution off the table. “We can still stop them from escaping.” He turned to the sailors. “You guys are coming along, too.” Before they could protest, he added, “If you don’t help us win this fight, I’ll sail your boats out into the Gulf and scuttle ’em.”

  With a wave of his hand, BoomT engaged the pursuit. The sixteen men followed behind him at a trot. Minutes later, when he first caught sight of their quarry, he hit the brakes and stopped the column. One-Eye and his crew were about five hundred yards ahead, just crossing the railroad tracks, starting to slog through the black water toward downtown. Picking up the binocs, the fat man counted seven, not six opponents. Captain Tom was indeed among them. In point of fact, the traitorous trader was heading the nukin’ parade. And not apparently at gunpoint. BoomT watched him lead Cawdor and Pipsqueak and the others up the ramp and onto the floating dock. When they disappeared between the half-submerged buildings, it was time to act.

  “We’ve got to close on them before they get under way,” BoomT said. He pointed to his four quickest and strongest surviving lackeys. “You, you, you and you,” he said, “beat feet down to the skiff loaded with the harbor net, and string it across the entrance. Don’t engage the bastards. Don’t return fire. Just lay the barrier net and then find positions on the crane side to defend it. If we can seal them in, we’ve got them. We can take our own sweet time with the chilling.”

  The quartet shoulder-slung their AKs and ran toward the water in the direction of the harbor mouth.

  “The rest of you come with me,” BoomT said, then he flattened the accelerator pedal against the firewall.

  When the heavily loaded golf cart bumped over the railroad tracks and splashed into the brackish water, BoomT once again hit the brakes. The vehicle had tiny wheels. If he went any farther the water level would rise to reach the motor and batteries, and short everything out. Cinching up his bedspread toga, the fat man unclipped an RPG from the canopy frame. It was the killshot. The ship sinker. It looked like a child’s toy in his huge hands.

  BoomT slid off the seat into the warm, shallow water. He sloshed toward downtown at top speed, and his sec men and the sailors trailed in his foaming wake.

  Grunting from the effort, the fat man waded knee-deep between redbrick buildings, then mounted the concrete ramp to the floating dock. “We’re going to lower the odds,” he told his men. He picked the two best shots from among the survivors. They only had iron sights on their AKs, but 30-round clips gave them plenty of wiggle room. “Get up on the rooftops,” he ordered the pair. “Hold your fire until they’re on the open stretch of dock. Then they’ve got nowhere to go except in the water. Take out as many as you can, pin down the rest. We’ll do the mop-up.”

  The snipers ran ahead down the dock, alongside the drowned buildings. Just before they vanished from sight, they slipped through broken-out, lower-story windows.

  BoomT sent the rest of the men ahead. It irked him but he had no choice. If he went first, he’d slow down the advance. Not only would five hundred pounds of running weight overstress the dock’s salvaged planking, it would create a rocking motion so violent it would make standing difficult and aimed fire impossible.

  When his crew was forty yards distant, BoomT set out after them, taking care where and how heavily he stepped, steadying himself with a hand against the buildings’ sides. Even so, the dock lurched sickeningly under him.

  A string of single shots barked from the rooftop of the building to his left.

  The fat man hurried, his arms extended like a tightrope walker, to catch up to his main force, which had already reached the start of the unprotected section of dock. The undulation became so extreme that to keep from falling in the water, he dropped to his hands and knees and madly crawled the last ten yards.

  The dock’s violent motion continued, as did the sniper fire.

  To the right, he could see four men in a small skiff, two rowing for all they were worth, two frantically pushing a folded, weighted net over the stern. They were halfway across the harbor mouth.

  Two hundred yards away, One-Eye was scrambling aboard a moored sailing ship. The vessel lay broadside to BoomT, across the open stretch of water, a sitting target.

  The fat man shouldered the RPG, but because of the dock’s movement he couldn’t keep the ship in his sights. He had to hold fire. He couldn’t waste the shot.

  “Go get ’em!” he shouted at the huddled sec men and sailors, waving them onward, toward the unprotected section of dock. “Don’t let ’em cast off!”

  Chapter Ten

  Ryan broke into an all-out sprint as single-fire rifle shots rained down on the exposed dock. Bullets zinged over his head, splintering the thirty-foot stretch of planking that separated him from Jak. The companions knew better than to bunch up while crossing open space. Hitting an individual, moving target was much more difficult than lobbing rounds into a pack of bull’s-eyes. The up and down, wavelike movement of the dock both helped and hurt the companions’ cause: it messed up the snipers’ stationary leads, but the tricky footing meant it took longer to reach hard cover.

  The one-eyed man counted at least two AKs steadily popping off behind him. He couldn’t stop, turn, locate the targets and return fire with the Steyr to put up cover for his battlemates. Headlong forward motion was all that was keeping them from being hit.

  And even that wasn’t enough.

  Directly in front of him, Jak’s C-4 backpack took a solid whack, jerking sideways on its backstraps. The slug drilled through and left to right into the water, missing the albino’s rib cage by a fraction of an inch. The impact caught him in midstride and knocked him off balance, driving him to a knee. Unhurt, unfazed, the albino teen bounced back up at once and ran on.

  One hundred feet away, the far end of the dock was tied to the partially sunken base of the Big Arthur crane. Ryan saw Tom lead Krysty, Mildred, J.B. and Doc onto the crane deck then to the right, behind the cover of the moored sailboats. Five ships blocked the sniper fire.

  Ryan and Jak raced to close ranks, bullets dogging their heels. As they jumped onto the crane and ran behind the stern of the first ship, a flurry of slugs slapped its fiberglass superstructure, plowing into the hull and ricocheting off the steel masts. All along the moorage the live-aboard crews of the trader vessels were shouting and cursing as they dived for cover.

  The snipers were tracking and zeroing in on the companions’ movement between the ships. A tall, stringbean of a sailor stood at the precisely wrong moment. A shot intended for Ryan hit him squarely in the shoulder, twisting him, and he went over the port rail backward, screaming as he fell into the gap between the ship and the crane’s base. He entered the water headfirst.

  Captain Tom bellowed through a cupped hand along the line of ships, “Keep the fuck down!” He had stopped beside an off-white sloop with an oil- and chem-stained hull and battered steel masts.

  As Ryan and Jak ran low and fast toward him, Tom hurried Krysty, Mildred, Doc and J.B. aboard the amidships’ gangway, guiding them down into the cockpit and out of sight belowdecks.

  Ryan couldn’
t miss the ship’s name painted in peeling, cursive letters across the stern: Tempest. Bolted to the top of the stainless-steel stern rail was a canvas-shrouded longblaster on a swivel mount. It had a massive box magazine.

  Shooting back wasn’t what was on Tom’s mind.

  “Cast off the lines!” he shouted at Ryan and Jak, then he disappeared below the coaming.

  Ryan did better than that, whipping out his panga he slashed through the two-inch braid on the crane cleat with three hacking blows. Beside him, the ship’s auxiliary diesel engine started up with a burbling rumble. Gray smoke puffed from exhaust ports just above the waterline.

  From the bow cleat Jak waved and shouted to Ryan. “Longblaster! Up here! Quick!”

  Ryan dropped the end of the severed line. Sheathing his panga as he ran, he unslung the Steyr. Kneeling next to Jak, looking under and around the bowsprit, he saw a rowboat crossing the harbor mouth about one hundred yards away. The seated men at the oars were working in unison and stroking hard. Two others stood bent over the stern, dumping a barrier net over the side. From the floats bobbing on the surface, they had already blocked more than half the entrance.

  Ryan tossed his backpacks onto the sailboat’s foredeck, then scrambled over the rail himself.

  “Get aboard!” the captain hollered as he put the engine in gear and the ship started to slide away from the moorage.

  As the gangway glided past, Jak jumped the widening gap, onto the port deck, and scrambled into the cockpit.

  Bullets rattled the deck, shattering the fiberglass and skipping off the brightwork. There were definitely more than two sources of fire now. Shooting was coming from the dock, as well.

  Ryan flipped up his scope’s lens covers as he moved behind the skimpy cover of the anchor chain locker.

  Clear of the other trader ships, but still broadside to incoming fire, Tom redlined the diesel and the vessel surged forward.