Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  As he charged the actuator handle, chambering the magazine’s first bullet, there was movement all along the firing line. The survivors were stepping up to the blasters. Because of the smoke he couldn’t see very far down the corridor, but he could see Krysty and Doc on his left, hunched over their own assault rifles. They looked unhurt.

  He bellowed first in one direction, then the other, “Everybody, this is Ryan. Check in! Check in! Let’s hear you.”

  One by one from either side there came answering shouts. Each affirmative sent a surge of relief coursing through him. Mildred, Jak, J.B. and Doc were all okay. So was Harmonica Tom.

  There was no way of telling how many other people had lived through the barrage; however many it was, it was going to have to do. Ryan knew he couldn’t count on any of them having fired an automatic rifle before, let alone be able to hit moving targets at long range.

  “Don’t shoot until they come ashore!” Ryan called out through a cupped hand. “Wait until they’re on the ramp. Then they won’t be able to use the mortars without hitting their own troops. We’ve got to sit tight and let them come to us. Wait until they’re so close we can’t miss. Check your actions and barrels, make sure there’s nothing stuck in them. Make sure you’ve got extra mags close to hand.”

  Ryan used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his eye, which was tearing profusely, trying to rid itself of dust. When his vision cleared, he looked out the blasterport again. The two rafts were moving at a rapid clip, four sets of oars dipping in unison, rowers really putting their backs into the strokes. The pirates knew until they reached the shore they were dangerously exposed.

  Four hundred yards. Three hundred yards.

  Having recovered their senses and their wits, the islanders manning the blasterports were venting at top volume. They cursed and yelled insults at an enemy that couldn’t possibly hear them; they promised revenge to the corpses that littered the hallway. Their understandable fury was on the verge of boiling over.

  Way too soon.

  “Hold your fire,” Ryan cautioned them. “Don’t shoot, yet. Let all the pirates land. Let them get close.”

  Two hundred yards.

  The closer to shore the Matachìn rowed, the more agitated and vocal the islanders became.

  Ryan shouted over the rising noise, repeating his warning to hold fire.

  The other companions picked up his refrain, passing the word up and down the hallway for the shooters to wait.

  One hundred yards.

  Off to Ryan’s right, out of sight in the gloom, an AKM opened fire. And once that happened, there was no stopping the rest of them. Assault rifles cut loose all up and down the ship’s port flank.

  “Shit!” Ryan snarled. There was only one thing left for him to do: join the turkey shoot. He snugged into the AKM’s buttstock and dropped the fire selector to full-auto. As he looked down the iron sights, he shouted over the din of sustained autofire, “Aim low! Aim low.”

  Downrange, over the AKM’s sights, he could see the bullets fall. No one had heard him, or if they had they didn’t understand that he was warning them to compensate for their elevation and down angle. A mini-hailstorm was hitting the water between the rafts and the tugboat that had launched them. The others were shooting way high. At least six of the AKs would be on target—his and the companions’.

  Ryan dropped the sight post a good five inches below the bow of the first raft and cut loose a short burst.

  Too low.

  The bullets splashed sixty feet in front of the bow. He raised the sights, cutting the low hold in two, and pinned the trigger. He let the muzzle climb walk the stream of slugs right up the middle of the boat. The vibration of the autofire from both the recoil and the clattering bolt, and the distance to target made it hard to see exact hits, some seemed to go wide on either side of the pontoons, but the hailstorm had definitely found the pirates.

  As Ryan stripped out the empty mag and reached behind his back for a fresh one, the combined firepower of twenty or so AKMs finally locked on the invaders, more or less. The water around the two craft was whipped to a froth by hundreds of 7.62 mm rounds.

  The pirates in the rafts didn’t attempt to return fire.

  Those that hadn’t already abandoned ship were too busy dying.

  Under the squall of bullets, both boats’ pontoons took multiple hits, burst and immediately started to deflate. Without flotation, there was nothing to keep the plywood floors from sinking beneath the weight of the dozen or so bodies they each supported. And sink is what they did, leaving some of the corpses drifting on the blood-slicked surface. Even though the enemy was facedown and out of the fight, the islanders continued to hammer their backs with blasterfire.

  Other gunners along the firing line tracked the pirates who’d jumped ship and were trying to swim for the beach. The accuracy required was too far and too fine. The pirates dived under the water to avoid being hit.

  “Hold your fire!” Ryan said as he slapped the mag home and racked the actuator handle.

  Again, no one was listening to him.

  Buoyed up by their success, the islanders started strafing all three tugs, fanning at them with lead. They were burning up ammo like there was no tomorrow.

  Ryan shouldered the assault rifle, but this time didn’t fire. Five hundred yards was at the extreme limit of an AKM’s range. Accordingly the hit ratio on the new target set was even lower, the spread of bullet fall much wider.

  Some of the slugs were landing on the boats, though. They had to be, based on sheer volume and concentration. The three tugs had low metal awnings along the sides of their top decks. Because of the down angle, Ryan’s view was completely blocked. He couldn’t see if anything of importance was being hit.

  The second fusillade was pointless, except in celebration of a temporary victory. The other four rafts were protected by the ships’ hulls. All the pirates had to do was move to the far side of the wheelhouses to avoid the autofire.

  As simple as that.

  After another minute or so of melee, the islanders stopped shooting and started whooping it up, cheering and congratulating one another.

  Turning back the pirates had been a piece of cake.

  Way too easy, as far as Ryan was concerned. He knew something triple bad was coming. Before he could snatch up his longblaster and gather his companions it was on top of them.

  Mortars flashed from the bows and decks of all three tugs. The screeches of the shells were shrill—and short.

  The world went white again, white and blistering hot, and the outside wall seemed to jump into Ryan’s face. He bounced off the AKM and the blasterport, bounced backward onto his side on the deck, facing the stern.

  Tremendous explosions rocked the hull again and again. Blinding orange strobe light flashed the length of the corridor and the exterior wall imploded, sending steel plates and shrapnel flying down the hall, ricocheting off and gouging through the opposite wall.

  If people were screaming as they were hit, their cries were lost in the roar of the detonations.

  The floor and the walls slammed into Ryan. He was rattled like a marble in a jar as waves of skin-melting heat washed over him. He tried to crawl to where he’d last seen Krysty, but he couldn’t make headway, and all he could see through the smoke and dust and screaming shrapnel were the brilliant flashes of igniting HE.

  The pirate mortars were firing at low angles into the side of the ship, blowing apart sections of the hull and the gunners behind it.

  Death stormed up and down the passageway.

  Mindless.

  Senseless.

  Indiscriminate.

  A heavy, warm body crashed into Ryan from behind, landing across his legs. He turned to push it off. In a flash of HE light, he saw the islander man reach up to grab the end of a jagged spike of steel that protruded from the side of his neck.

  “No, don’t, don’t pull it out,” Ryan said as the shock wave, the heat wave, the air blast slammed them and then everything went bl
ack again. He wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken, or if he’d just thought the words.

  Two seconds later another explosion lit the hallway.

  And Ryan saw that it was already too late.

  The islander had yanked the dagger of steel from his throat. Bright arterial blood was jetting out of his neck, squirting well past the tip of his shoulder. The man looked puzzled at the outcome; and he tried to staunch the unstoppable flow with his fingers.

  Blackness slammed down.

  Ryan felt the man’s weight fall back across his legs. As he kicked himself free, the explosions stomped away from him, toward the stern. It was as though the pirate mortars were trying to cut the ship in two, lengthwise.

  Realizing that he had a window of opportunity, Ryan forced his arms and legs into motion. Ignoring the sharp debris that covered the floor, he started crawling as fast as he could toward the last place he had seen Krysty. He wasn’t thinking; he was acting on instinct and emotion. If this was where the two of them were going to buy the farm, he wanted to be by her side.

  He couldn’t see for the smoke.

  He couldn’t think or hear for the roar of shelling.

  Then even crawling was beyond him.

  The side of the ship opened up not fifteen feet away with a boom so powerful that it didn’t even register as sound. It was pure, instantaneous, incomprehensible force. Orange light. Intense heat. A blast wave lifted him sideways and slammed him headfirst into the interior wall.

  Everything went black.

  And this time, it stayed black.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Casacampo observed as his second in command positioned the Ek’-Way broadside to the new target, the grounded Texican freighter. His flagship’s powerful engines throbbed at low thrust, making every horizontal surface vibrate and buzz.

  On either side of them, the Xibal Be and White Bone Snake had taken up their respective firing positions.

  All was in readiness.

  With a curt order into his radio and a hand signal through the pilothouse glass, Casacampo began the precision shelling of the freighter’s top deck. The three tugs launched their first mortar rounds almost simultaneously.

  Unlike the shelling of the ville, this was an attack on a visible target, a spectacle to be enjoyed and savored.

  The commander watched through binocs as the mortars began to land down range. The explosions were impressive—colorful, loud and powerful. Orange balls of fire blossomed, tearing the stacks of cargo containers apart, blowing open the boxes on top, sending aloft a confetti of debris. Destruction rained down on the Yoko Maru’s main deck, from bow to stern. Under the merciless pounding, huge containers fell three storys, crashing to the deck. Some fell over the side.

  Then the Matachìn gunners turned their attention to the bridge tower, which commanded the deck and all access to it. It was the perfect high ground for snipers to hole up.

  The first shell’s explosion cut free the Lone Star flag, and took out the top twenty feet of the radar mast. As the huge flag fluttered down through the black smoke and fire, mortar rounds deconstructed the tower. Held together by little more than paint and rust, it came apart even more easily than the cargo containers. Successive explosions, laid one on top of the other, blew out the center of the tower, took it down story by story, leaving a yawning, smoking chasm between the port and starboard outside walls.

  Meanwhile, the contents of the burst containers were feeding the fires scattered all along the main deck. Flames leaped into the sky and oily black smoke poured off the bow in a river, blown hard downwind.

  Casacampo didn’t need binocs to see the deck burn. He adjusted the soggy butt of his cigar in the corner of his mouth. To him the conflagration was a beautiful sight. For the enemy hiding in the ship, it had to be a demoralizing shock. If the Matachìn weren’t interested in looting their precious predark stores, then those stores couldn’t be used as a defense, essentially as a hostage to forestall all-out attack.

  As the shelling continued, the commander tried to imagine what it was like being trapped inside that ancient steel can, with giants pounding on the roof. His already weakened opponents, if they weren’t blown apart, would be prostrated by the combination of sound and concussion, unconscious, disoriented. No trouble for the assault teams to mop up. He anticipated easy pickings just like Matamoros ville and Browns ville, an appropriate end to a glorious and victorious campaign.

  Picking up the microphone and hand-signaling his own crew, Casacampo called off the mortar barrage. It was time to get face-to-face, hand-to-hand. As the last echoes of the shelling faded in the distance, he gave the crew of the Xibal Be the honor of setting foot on the beach first.

  Looking out the pilothouse’s rear window, he saw the second of the Ek’-Way’s rafts being lowered from its davit into the water. His crew was loading weaponry in the other dinghy, which had already been launched, and which they held tethered on the tug’s starboard side.

  He raised his binocs again and watched as the Xibal Be’s rafts headed for shore. His pirates were stroking hard on their oars, eager for the coming slaughter. A thrill coursed through him. His own blood pounding, Casacampo reached up and rubbed the belly of a dangling Atapul X icon with the ball of his thumb.

  For luck.

  The first Lords of Death had been imprisoned and tortured by secret elements of the northern government. Because of the horrors that had been done to their ancestors, subsequent Lords felt a particular hate for all things Deathlands. But until recently they hadn’t been in a position to make their hatred felt. Only recently had it been in their interest to expend military assets to that end.

  Casacampo knew the Yoko Maru had been bound for Brazil before Armageddon swept it off course. He hadn’t seen a copy of the ship’s manifest, a copy no longer existed, but he had an idea of what was in it. The contents of the Yoko Maru might have been valuable to the Brazilians of the period or to the Deathlanders, neither of which had anything better, but to the Lords of Death and their minions, the Matachìn, it was just century-old, second-rate crap.

  Casacampo’s pirates would, as was their custom, help themselves to whatever gold and jewels they could find, and to the various orifices of the survivors at blasterpoint, but as to the other stuff, the cargo of the Yoko Maru, the treasure of Padre Island, it was only good for burning.

  The destruction being wreaked was savage, but it wasn’t mindless.

  There was strategic, long-term gain in it for the Lords of Death.

  The sooner the predark stockpiles were gone, the faster Deathlands would revert to the Stone Age. Stone Age people couldn’t hold territory against automatic weapons and artillery. And ultimately, it was all about territory, about having room to expand, resources to exploit. It was about spending as little of your own capital as possible to get the most return. Six hundred years before, Casacampo’s progenitors, dressed in loincloths and armed with clubs, knives and magic spells, had tried and failed to repel an invasion by a more technologically advanced civilization.

  Now the shoe was on the other foot.

  A sudden clatter of autofire broke his train of thought. At first he couldn’t tell where it was coming from. There was nothing for his men to shoot at. Then he looked across the water to the grounded ship and saw the muzzle-flashes winking all along the side of the hull. He quickly focused the binocs. The blasterports, so narrow he had missed them, were now all too obvious, lit up as they were by blasterfire.

  The bullets weren’t aimed at him.

  Casacampo’s stomach tightened as he turned the optics on the landing party. Between the Xibal Be and its rafts, the water was being churned to a froth by bullet fall. The Matachìn in the dinghies stroked harder, trying to row away from the autofire and make it to the shore.

  They weren’t going to make it, the commander could see that. It was too far. They were moving too slowly, and it was too easy for the enemy to walk their blasterfire onto the boats.

  As he watched, a hail storm
of lead swept over both of his rafts. The inflatable pontoons were instantly torn to shreds. Some of the Matachìn managed to jump or pitch themselves over the sides. Most couldn’t get out from behind their oars. Trapped on the thwart seats, the concentrated rifle slugs chewed them to pieces.

  Without the pontoons, there wasn’t enough buoyancy to support the plywood decks or the rowers. As the rafts rapidly sank, bodies floated free.

  The survivors swam hard for the beach, targeted by autofire.

  Casacampo shouted into the microphone for his gunners to resume shelling. “Aim for the side of the ship!” he said.

  As the Matachìn lowered the angle of their launch tubes, bullets began raining down on the port side of the flagship tug, pelting the roof of the slaves’ sun shade. The blasters were too far away for accuracy, but the rowers couldn’t get out of the way. They tried, pulling on their shackles, taking cover behind their seats and one another.

  Blood sprayed the deck and men screamed.

  Then the port window of the pilothouse imploded, sending glass flying. Casacampo turned his head to avoid being cut in the eyes and face. He snarled a curse, then shouted into the microphone. “Fire! Fire!”

  Gamely standing their ground, the mortar gunners let fly.

  The shells looped over the water at low angles, with muzzle climb compensated.

  Bright orange explosions lit up the flank of the ship. The incoming fire shut off in the same instant. Casacampo watched through the binocs as cavernous holes opened up in the hull. Along the row of blasterports, chunks of steel plate flew off like they were made of cardboard. Entire sections of the interior hallway were exposed to view, and hit over and over again. Smoke poured from within.