Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  Mildred summarized the symptoms in her head: agitation followed by prostration and collapse; evidence of high fever, vomiting and diarrhea; facial pallor and cyanosis of the lips; profuse sweating; bleeding from mouth, nose and gastrointestinal tract. Her pulse was dangerously weak.

  “Based on the symptoms she’s presenting,” she said, “I think it could be some variety of hemorrhagic fever. Yellow or dengue. There’s no evidence of redness of the tongue or jaundice to the skin, so that eliminates yellow fever. As I recall, there were four serotypes of the dengue virus, none of which was fatal. But any of the four varieties can escalate into Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever or Dengue Shock Syndrome, which are both very bad news. Without oral and intravenous fluid replacement and supplemental oxygen, the predark mortality rate for DHF and DSS was close to fifty percent.”

  “You sound somewhat less than confident, my dear,” Doc said. “Is there a remaining question regarding the diagnosis?”

  “Afraid so,” Mildred said. “A real big question. Back in the day only one out of a hundred infected with the virus advanced to the hemorrhagic form of the disease. Based on the body count I’m seeing, it looks like everybody here caught it and most of them have died.”

  “Can you help her?” Krysty said.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” Mildred said. “Not even with a plasma drip, if I had one. Her platelet count is probably so low at this point, she’d bleed out at the intravenous site. She’s in the final stages of circulatory collapse.” When Krysty gave her a blank look, she explained further, “Her heart isn’t pumping hard enough to move the blood through her body. She’s dying.”

  “Can we catch whatever she’s got?” J.B. asked.

  “Dengue is a blood-borne virus,” she told him. “Infection requires blood-to-blood transmission.”

  “What means?” Jak asked.

  “Mosquitos are the primary vectors of dengue fever, that’s how it’s spread from person to person,” Mildred said. “Look around this place, there’s puddles of standing water everywhere. We need to be long gone from here before the skeeters come out.”

  “Can you hear that?” Tom said. “Can you hear that?”

  From around the bend in the lane, from deeper in the ville, came the sounds of feeble groaning.

  Multiple groaners.

  The skipper didn’t wait for the others this time. This time he forged ahead, full speed up the path.

  As Harmonica Tom disappeared around the winding turn J.B. grumbled, “He knows we can’t sail the radblasted ship without him.”

  “Then we’d better hurry up and get this over with,” Ryan said, urging the companions onward.

  Mildred didn’t immediately follow her friends deeper into the ville. She remained by the stricken woman’s side. She couldn’t do anything to help the poor woman, but she was unable to walk away and desert her in her final moments. She had lost everything—everything except her pain. Mildred reached down and put a hand to the clammy forehead. There was no way of telling whether the woman could hear her, but hearing was one of the last senses to fail.

  The doctor leaned closer and gently, slowly, stroked the crown of the woman’s head. Softly she said, “It’s okay for you to give in to it now, honey. It’s okay. It’s over. It’s okay to stop fighting. It’s time for you to let go. To float away and be with your darling babies again. It’s okay. It’s okay…”

  As Mildred stroked and reassured, the woman’s body relaxed, head to foot. Then the trembling of her hands stopped, as did the shallow, frantic rise and fall of her chest. And she was gone. Gone like a shot to wherever she was bound. Mildred carefully brushed closed the lids of her blankly staring eyes.

  Mildred had seen hundreds of people on the verge of death since her reanimation. Despite her extensive medical training, she’d been able to help few if any of them. That experience had not inured her to the death or suffering of others. Death and suffering had always touched her heart before, and she was touched now. The first time Mildred had “died” she’d skated on the experience: she had been unconscious and on an operating table. When the next time came she knew there would be no anesthesia, no oblivion; there probably would be intense pain; and she hoped that someone, even a complete stranger, would be kind enough to tell her goodbye.

  Mildred scooped up a handful of sand and as she hurried to join the others, used it to clean her fingers. After wiping off her hand on the leg of her BDU pants, she unholstered her Czech wheelgun.

  Around the bend, she could see more dead people. They were collapsed across the thresholds of the wall-to-wall huts and facedown in the lane, which was no more than fifteen feet wide.

  The others had fanned out to either side of the path, and were leapfrogging, checking bodies and looking into the shacks for the source of the continuing moans.

  “Hold it! Everybody freeze!” J.B. suddenly shouted. “Don’t take another step!”

  Everyone stopped and looked at J.B. for an explanation. Standing in the middle of the lane, he reached out with the barrel of his scattergun and pointed to a thin black metal wire running just along the surface of the sand. It was stretched perpendicularly across the path between a pair of ramshackle structures.

  “Trip wire,” he announced. “This place is mined.”

  “More wire, over here,” Jak said from twenty feet farther up the slope.

  “And here, too,” Ryan said, staring at the ground in front of him.

  Mildred watched Ryan as he looked from trip wire to trip wire, following them to their respective end points.

  “It’s a radblasted triangle,” he said. “Three antipersonnel mines. From the looks of it, they’ve been rigged in unison. One blows, they all blow. Anything inside the killzone is guaranteed chilled.”

  The low moaning suddenly got louder. And it was accompanied by a rustling, scraping sound. Mildred looked up the lane, past Jak and Ryan, beyond the trip wires they had located. The noise seemed to be coming from one of the shacks on the left, a hut higher on the hill that they hadn’t searched yet.

  “We need to back out of here right now,” Ryan said in an even voice. “Back out the way we came, very carefully in the same footsteps if we can.”

  Before they could retreat even three yards, a disheveled man crawled out of a hut on the left. His face was crusted with dried gore, and fresh blood oozed in a wet, red stripe from his nose down over his lips and chin.

  Heaving himself forward into the lane, crawling in their direction, the man howled, “Wait! Wait! Help me!”

  “Stay where you are!” Tom shouted at him. “Don’t come any closer!”

  The man kept coming.

  Mildred’s heart sank as she watched Jak raise his Colt Python and take careful aim at the poor delirious bastard who was about to kill them all.

  Before the albino could fire, Tom’s stainless-steel Smith & Wesson barked. The gunshot echo resounded up the hillside. The .45 slug kicked the man’s head hard to the right, his brains exited in a puff of pink mist mixed with bone fragments. He dropped to the sand, his twitching hand lay six inches from the trip wire.

  Mildred saw a wave of dismay and disgust cross the skipper’s face as he looked down at the cratered mess he had made of the man’s skull.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid…” Tom hissed down at the dead islander. He didn’t look happy with himself, either.

  There was more moaning and more rustling from the ville above them. Before they could resume their retreat down the path, two very sick men staggered into view. Raving with fever, coughing, bloody, but still on their feet, they lurched downhill.

  “Stop where you are!” the skipper cried, his weapon half raised. There was an edge of desperation in his voice.

  Perhaps they couldn’t hear him. Perhaps they were hallucinating and didn’t understand the words. Perhaps they didn’t want to understand.

  “Back up!” Ryan shouted to the others. “Everybody back the fuck up!”

  Seeing companions in full retreat made the sick men c
ome even faster, wobbling down the lane, straight for the wire.

  “Hit the deck!” Tom shouted over his shoulder as he bolted to the right.

  The companions split up, diving for cover on either side of the path.

  Mildred and Krysty barreled through a doorway shoulder to shoulder. They hit the crude floorboards hard on palms and knees, almost skidding into a trio of bloated human forms.

  The trio of deafening explosions overlapped, shaking the ground beneath them. Ball bearings blasted through and splintered the plywood wall like a volley of grapeshot, whining over their heads before slamming through the far side of the shack. Dust and rust rained down from the underside of the corrugated steel roof. Down on the open eyes of the hut’s former occupants.

  As Mildred and Krysty backed out of the wretched hovel, a dense smoke cloud hung over the lane. As it lifted, all that was left of the two sick men were their legs from the shins down and bloody rags flung against the scorched and partially collapsed fronts of the huts closest to the combined blast.

  “Claymores in tight quarters,” the Armorer said, shaking his head in disgust. “Nukin’ awful.”

  Ryan turned to the skipper and said, “Have you seen enough?”

  Half question. Half accusation.

  Tom nodded grimly. “It’s too risky to go farther,” he said. “The ville’s a lost cause. The last time I anchored here there were a lot more people than what we’ve seen. The others must have taken shelter up in the ship.”

  “Could they all be dead, Mildred?” Krysty asked.

  “From the way this dengue variant seems to operate, dead or dying are both distinct possibilities,” Mildred said.

  After they had backtracked to the edge of the shantytown, Krysty voiced a question. “I don’t understand the connection between the sickness and the laying of the Claymores,” she said. “The islanders wouldn’t rig their ville with booby traps unless they thought they were about to be overrun, and unless they were leaving it to the invaders.”

  “The unfinished grave and the discarded shovels imply a hastily diverted purpose,” Doc speculated, “as do the strewed corpses and the abandoned dying. I am afraid there is only one logical order of events here. The plague came first, the booby trapping second. No one in full command of their faculties would trip wire a ville that was still inhabited. I think we can assume that circumstances beyond the islanders’ control forced them to stop dealing with the outbreak of disease and its aftermath—tending the stricken and burying their dead—in order to lay explosive traps for their enemies and then withdraw to the relative safety of the grounded vessel.”

  “But that would mean…” Krysty began.

  “We’re in deep shit,” Ryan finished.

  As if in confirmation of that fact, a heavy machine gun on the far side of the dunes opened fire with a sudden, furious clatter.

  Somewhere in the distance out to sea, huge engines bellowed to life.

  “Come on!” Ryan shouted, waving the others after him as he turned away from the ville and stormed toward the slope opposite, beelining for the top of the island’s sandy spine, an elevation that would give an unobstructed view of the southwest and the source of all the racket.

  Mildred fell in behind J.B., scrambling up the steep, shifting, boot-sucking grade. No one questioned Ryan’s decision to recce. They needed to know what they were up against before they could craft a response.

  Cresting the top of the dunes, the companions had their answer.

  Seven vessels approached the southwestern tip of Padre Island. The fleet was about two miles offshore, and closing. Four large sailing ships. Three massive tugboats with black smoke pouring up from their diesel stacks. The sailboats had all their canvas unfurled and were beating against the wind in a staggered formation, moving to the left for the Gulf side of the island while the tugs bore straight in for the point, three abreast.

  At the edge of the island below them, automatic fire continued. Mildred could see the gunsmoke pouring over the top of the low, makeshift, fortified emplacement.

  Engines roaring, the three tugs abruptly changed course, splitting up to divide the gunpost’s effective fire.

  “They’re out of range,” J.B. said, grimacing as he adjusted the weight of his M-4000 on its shoulder sling. “That gunner is just wasting ammo.”

  “Mebbe he’s trying to warn them off,” Krysty said.

  “If he is, it’s not working,” Ryan said. He passed the minibinocs to the captain. “Do you recognize the ships, Tom? Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Not a clue,” the skipper admitted after he had a quick look-see. “Especially about those diesel-powered boats. Where the hell did they get enough fuel to run them? How did they get so close to the island without starting them up? They don’t have masts for sails. One thing’s for sure, if those ships were friendlies, the islanders wouldn’t have started shooting at them unprovoked.”

  “It would appear the islanders aren’t all incapacitated,” Doc said as the machine-gun clatter continued. “A show of a defense is better than no defense at all.”

  Without warning, in a blur of pale hair and limbs, Jak jumped backward a good three feet, bumping into the long-legged Victorian before he could shuffle out of the way. Inexplicably, the albino aimed his .357 Magnum Colt Python at the empty ground directly in front of him.

  “For nuke’s sake, Jak, what is it?” Ryan said.

  “Something under sand,” Jak told him without taking his red eyes off the target. “Not right. Something moved.”

  His pistol in front of him, Jak edged forward. He carefully dropped to one knee and brushed the surface of the sand with his palm, revealing the top of a fractured-off piece of plywood. Around the ragged edges, the grains of sand funneled away, like through an hourglass.

  Into a big hole beneath.

  Ryan signaled Jak to stand and take a step back. Then looking over the sights of his SIG, he said, “Whoever you are under the board, you’ve got seven blasters pointed at you. If you’ve got a blaster and it’s in your hand when we pull the lid off, we’re going to shoot you to shit.”

  “Don’t fire. I’m not armed,” said a thin, muffled voice from the underside of the board.

  Using the tip of his sheathed swordstick, Doc deftly flipped the plywood hatch out of the way.

  All the blasters drew a bead on the diminutive figure cowering in the narrow, neck-deep pit.

  Camouflage do-rag askew, the man looked up into the muzzle of J.B.’s 12-gauge and whimpered. Slowly he raised empty hands. There were angry skeeter bites on his face and bare arms. Dozens and dozens of them.

  “Are you sick?” Mildred demanded at once. “Are you sick like the others?”

  “N-no. I feel fine.”

  “Get the fuck out of there, and be quick about it,” Ryan said.

  As the do-ragger scrambled from the pit, J.B., Doc and Krysty moved well out of the way, giving Jak a clear background for a close range chill shot with his .357 Magnum.

  Soft-looking, big brown eyes and too-long lashes undercut the effect of a square, clefted, beard-stubbled chin.

  Mildred’s immediate impression was mama’s boy.

  “I’ve never seen you here before,” Tom said. “Who the hell are you?”

  The machine gun below stopped chattering, either because its magazine was empty or because the gunner had finally realized the enemy was too far away to hit.

  “I’m Daniel Desipio. I’m a Fire Talker,” the man told them. As he spoke he again raised his hands in submission. “A lot of people in the ville came down sick. I was trying to help them…”

  “You were helping them down that hole?” Ryan said sarcastically.

  “Islanders saw the pirates coming and those what could still walk hightailed it up to the freighter. Because I wasn’t of their blood, the bastards wouldn’t let me in there, so I had to find my own place to hide.”

  “How do you know they’re pirates?” Tom said.

  The machine gun on the dist
ant point opened up again, at a steady, rip-roaring 600 rounds a minute. There was still no response from the oncoming tugboats.

  “I don’t know for certain that’s who they are,” Daniel said. “But it sure seems like a safe guess.”

  “What about the sickness that killed all those people down in the ville?” Mildred asked.

  “A crewman off a trader ship came down with it first, right after I arrived,” Daniel said. “Then just about everybody else came down with it. And then they started dying off. All in the space of three or four days.”

  “I hasten to remind everyone that we could have easily avoided this unpleasantness…” Doc said.

  “Oh shut up, Doc,” Krysty said.

  “What’s done is done,” Mildred agreed. “What we need are some viable options to either dying from the fever or dying from gunshots.”

  “We can still escape,” Tom assured them. “There’s still time. If we weigh anchor and continue south we’ve got the wind behind us.”

  “You mean, run straight into the bastards, and not away from them?” J.B. said dubiously.

  “I can scoot Tempest along the edge of the mainland shore, right past those tugs but far enough away so they can’t cut us off. The pirate sailboats will be on the other side of the island by then. They won’t see us leaving the bay and when they do finally see us we’ll be on the horizon line. We’ll have such a lead they’ll never catch us. My guess is they won’t even try.”

  “I don’t like the looks of that,” J.B. said, nodding seaward.

  The three tugs had stopped their forward movement, and with idling engines, had taken up stationary positions roughly a mile and a half offshore. They were spaced more than seven hundred yards apart in the lee of the island, on water that was flat and glassy.

  “Me, either,” Ryan said. “We’d better get cracking.”

  “What about him?” Jak said, gesturing with the Python’s muzzle to indicate the hands-up Fire Talker.