Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  And using it to stay alive. J.B., Krysty and Jak couldn’t conceive of a world otherwise. A world where people depended on millions of others, but at the same time, within agreed-upon limits, had some independence. Where the public will produced mass transit, and mass food and energy. The companions’ only experience of a higher social organization was the baronies, a corrupt, poisonous feudal system based on oppression and exploitation. The idea of government devoted to the common good was alien to them—they suspected it was simply the baronies all over again, only on a grander scale.

  She had tried to talk to J.B. about it. But it was like trying to explain swimming to someone who’d never seen water.

  What Tom had said about the future of Deathlands made perfect sense. The current level of culture, savage though it was, was propped up by artifacts from the highest point of human industry and civilization. If anybody in the hellscape knew how to rebuild or operate the machines that had made that explosion of mass production possible, Mildred had never met them or heard tell. The requisite skills in math and engineering had been lost in the century of chaos after the all-out missile exchange. To create those skills in the first place, society had had to evolve to the point where a separate techno-scientific class could flourish and develop.

  How long had it taken for someone like Galileo to appear? Who paid his rent?

  As Tom saw it, the devolution of Deathlands had been postponed by the stockpiles and caches of predark goods that had survived the nukecaust. Therefore, Deathlands hadn’t hit bottom, yet. Based on what Mildred had witnessed and endured so far, rock bottom was going to be triple ugly.

  The idea of leaving the others, perhaps never seeing them again, was very painful for Mildred to even consider. She owed her companions more than she could ever repay. They had resurrected her from a cryotank tomb, they had saved her life over and over. But what she felt more toward them wasn’t just simple gratitude. Though there was certainly friction at times, they were dear friends; her only friends, in fact. More like family.

  The differences between their life experiences and hers were buried under the weight of the day-to-day fight for survival. The captain’s proposition had brought those disparities front and center, reminding the others who Mildred Wyeth really was; that part of her belonged to another world. Because she had special feelings for J.B., his pulling away saddened her the most of all. But she understood his reaction. If her world wasn’t lost, he was afraid he couldn’t hold her.

  Thrown over for a double-tall frappuccino?

  Whoa, that was something she hadn’t thought about in a long time!

  As fast as the memory appeared, she pushed it out of her head. There was only one bright spot that she could see: she and Doc still had a chance to change J.B.’s mind, to change all their minds about the voyage south.

  After an hour or so, the rain squall passed and seas flattened out a bit. In the wake of the storm the air temperature dropped and Mildred managed to doze off. Sometime later, she awoke, drenched in sweat. The sun had come out again. It blazed through the portholes on either side of the bow.

  Mildred carefully rolled out of the berth so as not to wake J.B., then timing her gait with the roll and heave of the boat, she climbed the forward companionway steps to the foredeck.

  The wind whipping off the Gulf cooled her down at once. The flying spray was as warm as bathwater. On the landward side, the sea was stained the color of rust, and yellow custard foam topped the waves. The wind carried the smell of baking bread. It wasn’t bread, Mildred knew. The odor was from volatile petrochemicals still seeping into the Gulf from ruptured tanks inland. Iridescent toxins, oils and tars had streaked Tempest’s white deck and coaming a nasty yellow-brown.

  She looked back toward the stern and saw the captain and Ryan standing in the cockpit, talking. Over the wind singing in the lines and the hiss and slap of the hull she couldn’t make out their words.

  Mildred moved aft, holding on to the stays and starboard rail, and climbed down into the cockpit.

  “Rough as a cob for a while there,” Tom said to her. “Sorry, but I couldn’t run around it. Too big a squall and it was coming too fast.”

  “No problem,” Mildred said. She glanced up at the stern rail. The rail-mounted machine gun was still shrouded in its waxed canvas. “I take it we’re still clear of pursuit?”

  “Lucked out so far,” Ryan said.

  “The competition is probably laying further offshore to stay out of the weather,” Tom said.

  The two seemed to get along well, Mildred noted. That wasn’t surprising. Both were products of the hellscape, and they were in many ways similar. Stoic. Determined. Battle-seasoned. Fearless. Men of legendary prowess who didn’t give a good goddamn what folks said or thought of them.

  It had already occurred to Mildred that Ryan might be more intrigued by the voyage of exploration than the other three Deathlanders. After all, he had been trawled to the shadow world, a parallel earth that had missed the nukecaust and was by far the worse for it. That experience had forcibly opened his eye to other possibilities. To alternatives to the status quo.

  Though he was a leader, Ryan was also very much his own person, a craggy promontory in the hellstorm. It seemed Harmonica Tom had touched a nerve; Ryan was taking his offer seriously, unlike the others. Mildred knew their hunker-down mentality could have been the product of exhaustion. All of them had expended strenuous effort in the preceding twenty-four hours, running and fighting while dehydrated and half-starved. If it was a temporary stubbornness, only time, rest and more food would tell.

  Tempest soon left the rusty sea behind. The edge of the discolored water was a stark borderline where suspended rust turned to deep emerald green. Beyond it, the Gulf’s swell became widely spaced and even. They were making excellent time, with a steady wind and clear sailing ahead.

  “I’m nuked,” Tom admitted, trying to work the kinks out of the back of his neck with his fingertips. “Got to shut my eyes for a little while. Can you handle the ship and hold course while I have a snooze?”

  “Sure,” Ryan said, taking over the helm.

  “Keep the wind at your back,” Tom advised as he started down the companionway steps. He winked at Mildred. “And don’t run into anything big.”

  JUST AFTER NOON, with Tom back in command, they approached the eastern tip of what had once been North Padre Island. Stretching ahead of them to the southwest, as far as the eye could see, was a vast curve of intermittently breaking surf. Small waves crashed on the patchy, seemingly endless offshore shoal. Like an abandoned spiderweb, hummocks of barely submerged sand caught ships. There were derelicts as old as skydark: cadaverous tankers, freighters and shrimpers. Some of the wreckage was smaller, made of fiberglass, and far more recent—the shoal was still catching traders’ ships. There were no lighthouses, no warning buoys marking the shallow water. The capsized, rusted-out hulks were a testament to the limits of dead reckoning.

  “Another twenty miles to the ville,” Tom announced. “Two hours mebbe, and we’ll be there.”

  One by one the other companions stirred themselves from belowdecks. Jak beelined for the bowsprit, and there he sat, his ghostly face into the breeze, his long white hair flying behind his head. Doc and Krysty joined Ryan and Tom in the cockpit. J.B. was the last to come up for air. He climbed the steep steps slowly, like an old man. His ribs had really stiffened up during the night. He groaned as he took a seat on the padded bench beside Mildred, cradling his chest with a forearm.

  “Want me to rewrap your ribs?” she asked him with concern. “Has the bandage come loose?”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said. “The ship rolled and I caught myself wrong. I’ll be fine in a minute.” With that, he tipped his fedora down over his eyes, settled into the seat cushion and seemed to go back to sleep.

  He didn’t want to discuss his pain, which from experience Mildred guessed meant he was hurting plenty. There was nothing she could do about that; she couldn’t even offer him an asp
irin. Barring compound fracture and lung punctures, rib injuries were customarily left to heal on their own. And at their own pace. J.B. was going to be hurting for a good long while.

  Six miles away, on the far side of the shoal, was the mainland coast, the southernmost edge of the much-feared Dallas-Houston death zone. What Mildred saw was a dark green wall of mangrove branches and the sun gleaming off trapped backwaters. Above the treetops, skeletal structures protruded, some of them clearly industrial with cylindrical, four-story-tall holding tanks and latticework walkways; others looked like condo towers gutted down to poured concrete walls and floors. Everything was draped with verdurous creepers. Mosses and vines trailed down to the waterline.

  At the base of the trees, where the beach should have been, lay an unbroken, miles long pile of rubbish. The partially submerged junk had been backwashed off the land as successive tidal waves receded. A peek through binocs revealed cars and trucks filigreed with rust. Disintegrating sofas and mattresses. Battered refrigerators, washers and dryers. On top of it lay the lighter stuff: heaps of splintered wood, plastic and aluminum.

  Deeper in the mangrove swamp, dense black smoke boiled up through the canopy and blew inland. There were no visible flames, just smoke. A huge section of the backwater burned. Something floating on the water had caught fire, oil or gasoline, Mildred thought. Perhaps set off by a lightning strike.

  “What are you looking for?” Ryan asked the skipper who was leaning over the port rail and scanning the horizon ahead, this while keeping a one-handed course a quarter mile from the edge of the breaking surf.

  “Looking for the Yoko Maru’s radar mast,” Harmonica Tom said. “We’ll be able to see the top of the mast long before we catch sight of the island. Got to be four hundred feet off the ground.”

  From his perch in the bowsprit, Jak let out a cry. “Lookee!” He pointed to the horizon.

  It wasn’t a mast.

  Tom cut the wheel hard over to starboard, giving everyone a full-on view of a brilliant pink light low in the sky, slowly sinking out of sight over the curve of the earth.

  “Signal flare,” Ryan said.

  “From a ship?” Krysty said.

  “Probably,” the captain replied.

  “How far off?” Mildred said.

  “Hard to tell,” Tom told her. “A ways.”

  “May we assume that some unfortunates ran their vessel aground?” Doc asked.

  “Could be,” the skipper said. “Take the helm, Ryan.”

  Harmonica Tom pulled the waxed shroud off the stern-mounted blaster and tossed it into the cockpit. The Soviet-made PKM light machine gun sported an unfluted barrel, and a skeletonized rear plastic stock and pistol grip. It had no carrying handle atop the action; instead of a bipod, it pivoted 180 degrees on a stand clamped to the rail. Under the receiver like a gigantic, olive-drab sardine can on its side, a 100-round-belt, boxed mag rode horizontally. The action and barrel glistened with protective grease. The business end of the ammo belt was already in the feedway. After removing and pocketing the muzzle plug, Tom dropped the selector switch from safety to fire, then charged the cocking handle. With a crisp clack the first 7.62 mm round chambered. Ready to rip.

  “Would traders-turned-pirate use an emergency SOS flare to lure another ship in close?” Mildred asked.

  By way of answer Tom said, “Mebbe a couple of you should go below and stock up on ammo for everybody. There’s a hatch under the rubber mat in the forward cabin. Pull out the big plastic tubs. It’s all boxed and clearly marked caliber and load. You should find everything you need.”

  Jak and Doc went below to gather up the requisite ammo and J.B.’s shotgun and Ryan’s scoped longblaster. Everyone else watched the horizon for the ship that had sent up the flare.

  Minutes passed. Jak and Doc returned with the bullets. They all reloaded their weapons and their extra mags. More time passed.

  There was nothing in front of them but empty sea.

  An hour later they caught their first glimpse of Padre Island through Tom’s binocs. When it was Mildred’s turn to look, she aimed the lenses at the dark blip on the horizon to the seaward, along the curve of shoal that divided the Intracoastal Waterway from the Gulf. She saw the top of the grounded ship’s radar mast and the tattered, enormous Lone Star flag flapping against the bright blue sky.

  Shortly thereafter, Tom shouted a warning to the passengers to mind the boom, then made an abrupt course change, steering toward shore. He ran the vessel through Aransas Pass, which had once separated Mustang Island and San Jose Island. Both landmasses were gone now, but the deep water channel between them still remained. Tempest entered the Intracoastal Waterway and continued southwest, pushed by a steady breeze.

  As they steadily bore down on their target, more and more mast became visible. The top third of the freighter’s towering rear smokestack was missing. The white bridge and wheelhouse atop the aft superstructure appeared. Then gradually, the whole ship came into view. It looked as if a giant hand had carefully lifted, then set the freighter down on dry land. It rested on its keel, slightly canted to port, on the highest point of the island. The top deck was still stacked three-high in places with cargo containers; some had tumbled over the side and onto the sand.

  “How long since you been here?” Ryan asked the captain.

  “Almost two months,” Tom said. “After I arranged for the scroungers to get the C-4, I sailed away east. I’ve been all the way to the Linas and back since then. I had a shipload of islander goods to move. Shoes. Clothes. Ammo. You’re not going to believe the predark stuff they’ve got in that freighter.”

  “Your ship’s pretty much empty, though,” Krysty said. “You traded the islander goods for what?”

  “Small objects of big value to barons,” Tom said. “Easily concealed. Gold and silver rings, bracelets, teeth.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mildred said, changing the subject. “What was the SOS flare all about? Is the ship that fired it farther to the south? Is that why we haven’t come across it? Or did it sink without a trace before we reached it?”

  “Neither of those things is likely,” Tom said. “If the ship had been farther away, over the horizon, we wouldn’t have seen the flare. If the ship had run aground on one of the sand bars, it would still be stuck there. I think the signal came from the island. The distance is about right. It was probably nothing. Just some of the kids playing around. The place is crawling with them. Islanders take their breeding serious.”

  As they scooted along the outer edge of Corpus Christi Bay, Mildred glanced over at the ruins of Corpus, itself. Aside from the skeletal skyline, there wasn’t much to see. The city was derelict, flooded, abandoned and overgrown.

  At the northeast corner of Padre Island, on the edge of a low bluff, was a partially buried gun position. The bunker was roofed and reinforced with layers of corrugated steel hacked from cargo containers. It was also heavily sandbagged. The firing port was a dark slit that ran the width of the emplacement. Mildred could make out the muzzle and ramp front sight of a heavy machine gun just inside the opening. No faces popped up as they glided by. And the MG’s sights didn’t turn and track them.

  If there were guns on the freighter, she couldn’t see them. The up-angle to the top deck was too steep. She could see through the underside of the radar mast’s steel mesh platform. The flag was flying but nobody was watching the store.

  Ahead was the ruin of the JFK Causeway bridge, which had connected Padre to the mainland. Only the footings on either end of the bridge remained intact; the deck had fallen into the channel. Tom steered Tempest to the deepest part of the waterway, then slipped between the jutting stubs of the bridge pilings.

  The ship began to lose way as it swung into the island’s lee. The captain cut in close to the shore, taking the shortest route to the protected anchorage.

  The beach was deserted. There were no other ships in the bay.

  “Where is everybody?” Ryan said.

  “Is something wrong
?” Krysty said.

  “No,” Tom assured them. “Ships come and go all the time. Sometimes the bay is packed, sometimes it’s empty.”

  “What about the people?” Krysty said. “You said there were lots of kids.”

  “Dunno,” Tom said, scratching the stubble on his chin. “Weird that there’s no cook smoke rising from the ville.”

  He didn’t seem worried, just a bit puzzled.

  The rusting bow of the Yoko Maru loomed above the ville’s clustered shacks, cresting an immense wave of sand. Mildred could imagine the next instant, the Lilliputian hovels squashed flat under its weight. There were maybe a hundred ramshackle dwellings built along the slope that led down to the anchorage, separated by winding, narrow lanes.

  It was hardly an impressive trading center, even by Deathlands’ minimal standards. The residential shacks were not much bigger than the outhouses. And there was debris everywhere. Paper, metal and plastic.

  “So the islanders are all in the freighter?” Mildred asked.

  “There’s no place else for them to be,” Tom said. “Mebbe they’re taking inventory. Mebbe they’re counting their kids. They ain’t all run off, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t leave their pot of gold.”

  With that, Tom dropped his sails and coasted into the middle of the anchorage. As the ship rapidly lost speed, he hopped out of the cockpit and ran forward to lower the anchor. The chain rattled off, then the hook struck bottom. Momentum carried the ship forward. Tom continued paying out more chain until he had the proper scope, then he locked it off with an eyebolt.

  As Tempest swung around at anchor, the captain stared at the deserted beach, hands on hips. Without a word he walked back to the cockpit and furiously rang the ship’s bell.

  The clanging echoed in the distance.

  Nothing stirred on the land.

  “That should have brought out the camp dogs,” Tom said.

  There was no evidence of dogs, not so much as a bark.

  Mildred suddenly got a creepy-crawly feeling. Not just that something wasn’t right; that something was very wrong. She wasn’t alone.