Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  “Or an excuse,” J.B. added.

  They proceeded down the deck alongside the stacks of rusting containers. The narrow aisles with towering stacks on either side were made to order for a cross-fire ambush from above. But no ambush materialized.

  Tom stopped them opposite a bollard on the right. The massive steel stump had been originally used to secure the eye of the waist-breast mooring line after it passed through a large opening in the port rail. Now the bollard backstopped a machine-gun position. Its bipod legs heavily sandbagged in place, a well-worn M-60 overlooked and controlled the southern approach to the island. Or it would have if anybody was home. Connected to an ammo satchel by a belt of 7.62 mm cartridges, the weapon had been abandoned.

  “Over there,” Doc said, pointing fifty feet aft and to the left where on the ground the sole of a white basketball shoe peeked around the corner of a deck-level container. They moved quickly but cautiously in that direction.

  The islander wearing the shoe was belly down and newly dead. Perhaps he had been the machine gunner; there was no way of telling. His face, neck and exposed arms bore the same red marks they had seen in the ville, and there was dark, congealed blood around his nose and mouth.

  “Another victim of the virus,” Mildred said.

  “A disease that appears to be relentless,” Doc said. “Relentless and merciless.”

  “Live one!” Jak announced to the others, reaching for his holstered Python, but stopping just short of the butt.

  Ryan turned to confront a blond boy of no more than fourteen who had popped out from a narrow gap between the containers. He wore a gaudy short-sleeved shirt and shorts, and high-topped basketball shoes like the dead gunner, only his looked three sizes too large. His hair had been shaved to stubble, and there were deep circles under his blue eyes. He didn’t look sick, just exhausted. He was haggard, but hard focused, and he seemed entirely comfortable holding the full-stock AKM in his hands.

  Apparently, a fourteen-year-old was the only one defending the freighter’s deck.

  Not a good sign.

  “Who the fuck are you?” the boy demanded in a hoarse voice, leveling the assault rifle to fire from the waist.

  Ryan could see the selector switch was set on full-auto. At the present range, there was no way the kid could miss. Gesturing for calm with both hands, he said, “We’re not with the bastards who shelled your ville, so you need to put down the weapon.”

  The boy showed no sign of doing that. Just the opposite. His mouth tightened into a narrow seam, and his fingertip curled around the trigger as he braced the metal shod butt hard against his right hip.

  The teenager looked from person to person, first the eyes, then the hands, clearly noting the fact that although their weapons were not drawn, they were within easy reach. The expression on his face was defiant and murderous.

  “I know I can’t chill you all,” he said, “but I can mess up most of you before you git me.”

  “We’re not the enemy,” Ryan said.

  The AKM’s muzzle swung to the left, locking on Ryan’s midsection. “Git down on your knees, Eye Patch,” he said.

  “That’s not likely to happen,” J.B. told him. “You need to take a deep breath and settle down.”

  “Fuck your advice, mister.”

  “We’ve all got the same problem,” Ryan said. “Look over there.” He indicated the three tugs, which had stopped five hundred yards off the beach and were holding position, parallel to the freighter’s deck.

  “Matachìn,” the teenager snarled.

  “Who?” Krysty asked. “What did he say?”

  “Matachìn, murdering pirate scum that come up the coast from Mex,” the boy said. “We heard they already burned Matamoros ville and Browns ville to the ground. If you don’t believe me, ask him…” He gestured with the AKM, pointing out the tagalong who was still keeping well back of the rest, pretending to be Doc’s shadow. “He’s the one who told us about them.”

  “Funny, he didn’t mention it to us,” Ryan said.

  “Mebbe it slipped his mind,” J.B. said, turning on the man in the do-rag. “Is that what happened?”

  Daniel Desipio didn’t say a word. He looked like he wanted to become invisible.

  “Not very talkative for a Fire Talker, is he?” Mildred said.

  “Not now mebbe,” the teenager said, “but you should have heard him when he first got here, before everybody took sick. He was on and on about all this triple-stupe shit from Mars, and how it was part of the Mex pirates’ plan to take over the hellscape. There was more bullshit about other people that he said came from the moon. Some of them were these giant mutie vegetables that could talk, drink whiskey and shoot blasters.

  “Nobody with norm brains could make sense of his Martian-moon crap-a-roo. The only ones on the island who paid him any mind were the droolies. He had them fuddle nuts eating right out of his hand. They followed him like baby ducks everywhere he went, even to the shitter. Everyone norm wanted to shut him up permanently. Either by stringing him up by the neck from the radar mast or by making him swim buck-naked for the mainland through a chum slick.”

  The intensity and personal nature of the attack made Daniel speak up, if not step forward. But it wasn’t in his own defense, as Ryan would have been expected.

  “Why do they hate me?” he asked, his voice breaking.

  It was a rhetorical question.

  And it had the opposite of the desired effect. It engendered expressions and exclamations of disgust, not sympathy from the companions.

  “Hey, don’t I know you?” Tom said to the boy. “Sure I do. You’re one of Nelson Reed’s kids.”

  “I’m Garwood Reed,” the teenager said. “Pa’s dead. So’s Ma. So’s most everyone. Or else they’re so damned sick they can’t hold a blaster.”

  “We’re all in for it, Garwood,” Tom told him. “You need our blasters to help defend the ship. We’ve got to pull together. You need to take us to the others. There’s no more time to waste.”

  “He doesn’t even have a blaster,” the boy said, nodding at Daniel. “Why does he have to come with us? Why can’t he just stay out here on deck?”

  “I can help the sick ones,” Daniel countered meekly and without much in the way of conviction.

  “Nose and butt wipe,” Garwood retorted, “that’s all he’s good for.”

  “Enough!” Ryan said. “We don’t have time for this. Move it, kid!”

  Garwood shut up and sulkily complied with the order. He slung his AKM and turned for the bridge tower on a dead run. The companions followed him through a doorway at the base of the superstructure and onto the tower’s ground floor. Ryan could see through the huge, rusted-out gaps in the ceiling to the story above. The steady breeze whistled through countless holes in the cheese grater tower.

  The teenager made a beeline for a metal staircase leading to the ship’s lower levels. On the landing wall was a row of burning torches in crude stanchions. Garwood snatched one of them and started down the steps. The flame threw a weak light down the pitch-dark stairwell. Ryan and Doc each grabbed torches and held them high, lighting the way for the others as they descended, single file.

  Over the sounds of their footsteps, Ryan heard moans echoing up the stairs. Sounds of disembodied pain and suffering. As they passed the second landing, he smelled the sickness wafting up from below. Vomit sweet and triple foul.

  When they reached the Upper Tween deck, Garwood exited the staircase and led them onto an all-metal corridor that extended into the dim distance, apparently the full length of the ship. The boy slipped his torch into a empty wall stanchion; Ryan and Doc followed suit. Torches weren’t necessary. Sunlight streamed through the blasterports cutting narrow, vertical wedges through the gloom.

  Most of the weapons Ryan had seen coming up the ramp were propped up on crates and unmanned. They had been positioned to look like there was an army lying in wait. The islanders had plenty of blasters, all right, but they were big-time short on gu
nners. Every fifth or sixth assault rifle had an actual person behind it. A couple were kids four or five years younger than the companions’ guide, and thirty pounds lighter. Ryan found it hard to believe that the first jolt of recoil wouldn’t put them square on their skinny little butts. There were a total of fifteen adults on the entire firing line.

  “This can’t be everybody,” Tom said in disbelief.

  “In here,” Garwood said. “They’re in here.” He unlatched, then strained to open a bulkhead door into a main hold. As the door swung back, it was clear the hold was where all the moaning was coming from.

  And the smell.

  The hold had no opening to the sun. It was lightless except for torches flickering in stanchions along the walls, airless and stiflingly hot. The metal walls steadily dripped rivulets of condensation, which had pooled on the metal deck. Cargo containers were stacked three-high inside the hold. They created canyons of darkness where no light penetrated.

  The Upper Tween deck hold was part hospital and part morgue, but mostly morgue. Islander bodies lay uncovered among the rubbish drifts of splintered wood, cardboard and burlap sacking. At a glance it was impossible to tell how many people were still alive. A dozen or so were on their feet though, and moving here and there around the hold, trying to help the stricken.

  With the smoke from the torches, the weak, erratic light they threw, the looming walls of the stacked containers, the incessant moaning and the smell of sickness and decay, it was like some lower pit of hell.

  Tom shouted into the hold, “Who’s in charge?”

  A jut-jawed woman straightened from tending one of the moaners. “Who the fuck’s askin’?” she snarled back. Wide across the hips, she had hugely fat and doughy upper arms. The pockets of the birdhunting vest she’d somehow managed to squeeze into bulged to bursting with high brass shotgun rounds. Sweat plastered her thin brown hair to her skull in stringy plaits. Slung on a canvas strap over her right shoulder was a sawed-off 12-gauge pump shotgun.

  “It’s me, Tom Wolf,” the skipper replied. “Is that you, Brenda?”

  Recognizing him, the woman looked surprised, then she smiled. “Dammit to hell, Captain Tom, you sure went and picked yourself a shitty time to pay us a visit.”

  “Spilt milk, Brenda, I’m here and that’s the truth,” he said.

  “You seen what those Mex pirates done to our ville?”

  “You don’t have a ville anymore, Brenda,” he said flatly. “And those same bastards are gonna be climbing up our butts shortly. I don’t get the feeling they’re in a merciful mood today. It’s gonna come down to chill or be chilled. How many of yours are well enough to stand and fight?”

  “Mebbe twenty-five total. Some of the girls are too little to hold a rifle, let alone shoot one. But what we’ve got to do first off is to blow up the access ramp, make ’em use ropes and grappling hooks to reach the top deck. That can’t wait. The charges are already set. Someone has to go out and light the fuse.”

  The sick man she was tending to suddenly lurched up into a sitting position. “I’m okay,” he said, his upper body weaving from side to side. “I can do it. I can do it. I’ll blow up the ramp…”

  It was obvious that he was not okay. He coughed from deep in his lungs, and he sprayed blood mist out of his mouth all down his shirtfront. A fresh coat. It was obvious he was dying.

  “Jimbo, right now you couldn’t blow up dogshit,” Brenda said, firmly taking hold of his shoulders and pushing him back down.

  Then she told Tom, “Mebbe we’d better take this out into the hallway.”

  “Send the Fire Talker,” Garwood suggested as they stepped over the bulkhead’s threshold.

  “I don’t know anything about explosives,” Daniel protested. “I’m a storyteller. A fabulator.”

  “All you got to do is light the fuckin’ fuse,” Brenda said.

  “Nukin’ hell,” J.B. muttered, “you can’t trust someone like him to do it right, or at all.”

  “Even a droolie could light a fuckin’ fuse,” Brenda replied.

  “Yeah,” Garwood said, “even a droolie. Make him do it. Make him go out there and do it.”

  Ryan watched Jak move to one of the unmanned blasterports and press his face against the opening, looking across the water at the parked tugs. Only a couple of seconds passed before the albino spun away from the blasterport and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Incoming! Incoming!”

  Before anyone could react, mortar rounds screamed down on the ship, detonating one after another on the main deck above them, a nonstop roar of explosions and tremendous concussion waves. Everything began to shake and roll. Ryan was staggered from one side of the corridor to the other. He swung the Steyr around on its shoulder strap, trying to protect its scope against his chest.

  He hit the exterior wall with his back and then was thrown forward. He crashed to his knees.

  Better stay down, he thought as shock waves flexed and rippled the floor beneath him and overlapping concussions pounded inside his skull. Fearing his eardrums might burst, he covered his ears with both hands and yelled as loud as he could to equalize the pressure.

  If anyone else was yelling he couldn’t hear them.

  He couldn’t even hear himself.

  Another volley of shells blasted the main deck, bow to stern. Dust and pulverized rust cascaded from the ceiling, obscuring the hallway in a boiling cloud. It even choked out most of the light pouring in through the gun ports.

  Ryan turned his face to the inner wall and raised a forearm across his brow to protect his one good eye from the debris fall. The pressure of the nearly continuous explosions was like a giant boot stomping him, head to toe. The world kept going white inside his head. Wall-to-wall white then black, as his consciousness winked in and out. Somewhere in the back of his mind, in the middle of it all, he managed a crystal-clear thought. He was aware, as never before, of the limits of his own skin, of his own being.

  Of his own fragile life.

  Doc had guessed right, he told himself. The pirates didn’t give a damn about the cargo. They were blowing the islanders’ booty all to hell, blasting the stacked containers apart, sending the topmost ones thundering down onto the deck. From the screeching against the outside of the hull, steel on steel, some of the huge boxes were sliding over the side.

  As the shells continued to land on target, Ryan lost count of them. He kept telling himself that it couldn’t get any worse. That if it did get worse, he’d be chilled and it wouldn’t matter.

  The pirates proved him wrong.

  A rocking boom almost directly above his head was accompanied by the shriek of tearing metal followed by a resounding crash on the hold side of the corridor wall. The impact jolted the floor under his knees and a column of light suddenly speared through the roiling dust, through the open door of the makeshift sick bay. Successive blasts ripped open the top deck, uncapping the hold’s roof and penetrating it.

  Through the cloud of dust Ryan saw the able-bodied islander ministers to the sick frantically lurching, stumbling and spilling out of the bulkhead doorway as they tried to escape falling metal.

  Some of them made it out, but not in one piece.

  The tugboat mortars dropped more rounds right down the hole they had just blown through the top deck, dropped them into the middle of the Upper Tween deck hold.

  A tight cluster of explosions from behind blew the runners out of their boots, out of the doorway, sending their bodies and severed parts of same slamming into the inside of the hull.

  A tremendous rush of searing hot explosive wind momentarily blasted away the dust and Ryan got a glimpse of Brenda, who was on the far side of the ajar hold door, pulling herself up to her feet by the handle. As another shell detonated, sending shrapnel flying out the doorway and into the hall, she used the back of the door as a shield. Throwing her considerable weight against it, she slammed it shut and dropped the latch.

  Before she could jump away, multiple shells exploded inside the hold. The corri
dor’s steel walls bulged, popping out rows of rivets, and the concussion knocked her off her feet. She hit the floor hard and stayed down.

  As the explosions continued to pound the wreck, the floor under Ryan undulated like it was made of liquid.

  There was nothing to hold on to.

  And there was no escape from what was coming.

  Ryan was certain that the next volley would take out the buckled wall, the hallway and everything in between.

  But when more shells rained down on the freighter, the explosions didn’t blow out the corridor walls. Instead, they bowed up the floor, which suddenly became too hot to touch. Ryan realized as he scrambled to get his boot soles under him that the muffled blasts had come from the deck below. A tightly grouped barrage had opened a hole in the Upper Tween deck, allowing HE to fall even deeper into the ship.

  Again and again, the mortars dropped shells on the same bull’s-eye. Again and again explosions in the ship’s very bowels shook the floor.

  The pirate gunners were coring it like an apple.

  Then the shells stopped falling and everything went deadly quiet. The floor stopped undulating. It was finally over.

  Coughing and choking, Ryan used the buttstock of the Steyr as a crutch. He pushed himself to his feet, then staggered around a heap of broken, unmoving bodies, to the nearest blasterport. Through the churning dust and smoke, over the barrel of an AKM, he could see one of the tugs had already swung a pair of rafts into the water and the heavily armed landing parties were rowing for the beach.

  The other two tugs had launched their rafts and were loading them with men and gear on the far sides of their pilothouses.

  Up and down the hallway, the survivors of the mortar attack were stirring.

  “Get to the blasters! Get to the blasters!” Ryan shouted at them.

  Twenty hostile targets were approaching the shore, with about twice that many about to debark the other tugs. It was a situation that called for firepower, not finesse. He carefully set the bolt-action Steyr on the floor.

  Before he checked the AKM’s mag, he brushed the dust and grit off the top of the receiver and ejection port. Under the dust there was wet stuff. When he looked at his fingers in the light, they glistened pink, blood mixed with serum. He wiped them off on his pants. The clip was full, and there were six more on the deck at his feet. He picked up a couple, checked the round counters, then stuck them into the back of his belt. Before he reinserted the rifle’s mag, he looked down the bore to make sure it was clear.