Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

by James Axler

  “The bilges,” Tom said.

  The teen gathered up his weapon and torch and disappeared through the hole, backward. His torchlight flickered in the opening, growing fainter by intervals.

  Steps, Ryan thought. There had to be steps, maybe a ladder on the other side, leading down to the keel.

  One by one the others slipped through the circular hole.

  The entrance was small and the steps into the dark were hard to negotiate backward. It was taking what seemed like a long time.

  Too long.

  “Keep moving!” Ryan urged them. He could hear the tramp of boots on the steps leading down from the Upper Tween deck.

  J.B. got past the opening, but with difficulty because his range of arm motion was limited by his rib injury.

  Then it was Ryan’s turn to descend.

  After holstering his SIG-Sauer, he backed through the low hole. He found the steps of a stationary steel ladder with the toes of his boots. As he started down, bracing one hand on the inside of the hatch, blasterfire roared from the other side of the engine room. Bullets banged against the hatch as he slammed it shut. He felt the impacts of the slugs all the way up his left arm, into the socket of his shoulder.

  There was no way to dog the hatch from the inside.

  Twenty feet below, torchlight danced in a ring where the companions waited for him. The dome of light that was cast revealed a gleaming, black, velvety liquid spreading out all directions. The perimeter of the enclosure was invisible, too wide across for the weak light to reach its edges.

  Ryan hurried down the ladder. The lake of black stuff was a remnant of the freighter’s supply of bunker oil, he guessed. More than a century ago, when the huge ship had been driven aground, its ruptured fuel tanks had bled down into the bilges. Diluted with sea water, the remaining oil was worthless as fuel, but even after the passage of all that time the stench of sulfur was still overpowering.

  By the time he reached the bottom of the ladder, Garwood was already leading the others across the shallow lake on a makeshift walkway. It was constructed of rough planking laid down on top of metal boxes and crates. The footing was wobbly at best, and in places it was slicked with oil; it wasn’t meant for a mass, high-speed exodus.

  Walking ahead of Ryan, J.B. lost his balance as the planking shifted underfoot, and he plunged in, up over his shins in the gunk.

  “Shit!” The Armorer’s comment echoed and reechoed in the yawning space.

  Ryan quickly helped him back up onto the walkway.

  On the starboard side of the ship, directly in front of them, Garwood had set the butt of his torch in a hole in one of the I-beams. It illuminated a half sheet of grubby plywood that rested against the hull, half in, half out of the bilge water. When the teenager slid the barrier aside, bright light streamed into the bilge through a jagged horizontal breach.

  Ryan looked up over his shoulder, back the way they’d come, and saw a crescent of light above where the ladder started, where the hatch was. He whipped out his SIG-Sauer, turned on the plank and cut loose, rapid-fire.

  The stuttering reports were punctuated by the clang of full metal jackets plowing into the inside of the hatch.

  The crescent opened wider, and this time autofire sprayed down into the bilge.

  Ryan stood his ground and, with a two-handed grip, put three tightly spaced rounds into the gap between the hatch and the wall.

  Boom-clang! Boom-clang! Boom-slap!

  Last sound was a 9 mm hitting flesh.

  The hatch stayed open.

  Ryan turned and quickstepped along the planking to the breach in the hull. There was no longer anyone in front of him. Everyone else had already ducked through the break and was out the other side. When he looked back one last time to check for pursuit, the SIG-Sauer up and ready to fire in his right fist, grens spewing clouds of gas were falling from the hatch into the bilge. They plopped into the bilge water, their caustic fumes boiling from the greasy surface like steam.

  Too little, too late.

  He crawled through the opening, out into sunlight so bright it hurt his eye. It took a couple of seconds before he could see his surroundings. At his back, towering six stories or more above him was the rusting hull of the freighter; in front of him was the dished-out back of a low sand dune.

  Harmonica Tom had the point. He was already cresting the top of the dune and the others were scampering after him, single-file. Mildred had hold of J.B.’s arm on the undamaged side of his ribs, helping him up the slope. Blaster in hand, Ryan brought up the rear. When he got to the summit of the dune, he looked down on a 150-foot-long, unprotected stretch of sand. It was all that stood between them and the backside of the burning ville.

  Running hard, they’d gone about fifty feet down the hill when from the side of the ship behind them somebody let out a loud shout.

  And kept on shouting.

  It didn’t sound like English.

  Whatever the hell it was, it was bad news.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Daniel Desipio sprinted down the broiling hallway, with bullets from behind zinging past his head.

  He wasn’t just running scared.

  He was running scared shitless, weak in the knees with terror as he approached the red glow and its incinerating heat. Forty feet away and it was scalding his bare arms and legs. He could visualize the skin sizzling and withering like steak on a grill. It hurt when he inhaled, too, an awful dull, burning pain in bottom of his lungs that forced him to breathe shallowly, to take tiny sips of air.

  Daniel couldn’t pull a sudden U-turn and head back for the oncoming Matachìn, yelling in Spanish that he was on their side—in the dark, under these circumstances, no matter what he yelled they’d shoot him for an islander. He didn’t want to continue in the direction he was going because he was afraid he was going to be cooked alive. He kept on running because the shooting by his masters was guaranteed, and the frying was not. Sweat poured down his face, down the sides of his chest, the middle of his back and into the crack of his butt.

  The red glow was fifteen feet away, then ten.

  This was a bad idea, he told himself. A very bad idea.

  He instinctively threw up his left arm, shielding that side of his face as he hurtled by the superheated section of wall. Flame rushed out of the hold’s doorway like a giant anaconda snapping for his head, and coming up short, it made do by frizzing all the hair on his arm, turning it into little puffs of dust.

  His sense of relief as he ran past it was almost hysterical. He suddenly had wings on his heels. Every stride took him farther away from a horrible death. On the fifth step a flurry of blasterfire and dozens of bullet blasted through the wall on his left and up into the ceiling above his head, startling him out of his wits.

  In that instant, Daniel felt his bladder release. He hadn’t even realized he needed to pee. And to pee massively at that. He kept running as the wetness traveled down the inside of his leg and into his boot. His toes squished every time his foot hit the deck. He didn’t care. A little pee in the shoe was much preferable to being burned alive.

  As he raced deeper into the darkness and the thickening smoke, he felt the fever pitch of his anxiety level drop a little. Perhaps there would be an opportunity to split off from these strangers ahead, he told himself. It was something he knew he had to do, and soon if he wanted to survive. The man with the eye patch and his six pals were going to continue to fight back, of that he was confident. The Matachìn tended to blast armed opposition first and ask no questions afterward. If you were caught in the wrong place with the wrong people, you were fair game.

  He was pretty sure the one they called Ryan wouldn’t shoot him without provocation. The islander teen was another story. Garwood’s open hostility and aggressiveness toward him had made him flash back to more than a century ago and one of his rare, SR book signings. The incident Daniel recalled had taken place in a tiny independent bookstore in a suburban strip mall. It hadn’t involved a machine gun, but there wer
e certainly balled fists and physical threats. Something to do with “continuity.”

  In another life, the idea of sailing away from trouble would have had considerable appeal to him. But in this life, Daniel couldn’t run away from what lurked in his blood. It belonged to him, and sadly, he belonged to it. Besides, knowing the Matachìn as he did, he seriously doubted that his temporary saviors could pull off the dash to the waiting ship, let alone the escape by sea.

  The pirates had a knack for outthinking and snaring would-be runaways. In fact, they took great pride in it.

  If escaping was a lost cause, why had he thrown in his lot with Eye Patch and crew in the first place? The answer was simple. He was more afraid of being blown to shit by shells lobbed onto the island from the tugs. He had witnessed “friendly fire” incidents in Matamoros ville and Browns ville that had taken out his fellow disease-carrying infiltrators. Mortars in the hands of the Matachìn were at best unpredictable. He would have gone into the freighter to hide if the islanders had let him.

  The savagery of the current attack, and fresh memories of what had happened before, had sucked him into a kind of panic vortex. In retrospect, he would have been better off if he’d jumped back in his hole in the sand and pulled the lid over the top. But he hadn’t been told in advance about Casacampo’s battle plan. Information like that was never shared with the lowly enanos. He had assumed, like the islanders, that the Matachìn were after plunder, either in the form of select goods or human beings. He was as surprised as the Texicans when that turned out not to be the case.

  At the end of the smoky hall, they came upon another set of stairs. The islander boy and the guy with the handlebar mustache checked for hostiles on the staircase. Temporarily at least, there didn’t seem to be any. There didn’t seem to be any escape route for Daniel, either. Going up the stairs wasn’t an option, nor was going back. And for the same reason: the combination of the dengue and the shelling hadn’t left the Matachín with a lot of lively targets, they would be itching for something, anything, to chill.

  Eye Patch held the fort on the landing while Daniel and the others descended into the bowels of the ship.

  It was much lighter, if not cooler, in the freighter’s engine room. Even so, Daniel found the place oppressive and deeply disturbing. The fire raging out of control between the massive engine blocks was a force of nature. It hissed and howled and made the floor shake. It reminded him of something immensely industrial, something out of a predark steel mill or foundry. And the low ceiling seemed to press down on him, seemed about to crush him. The ship’s rats had the same reaction. Sensitive to sound and vibration, terrified of fire, unsure of an escape route, they chased one another in endless mad circles on the deck.

  The black woman gave him a look as he slinked past her, empty-handed. It was much the same look Eye Patch had given him on the deck above after the second shelling when he hadn’t bent down to pick up a gun.

  “Are you a pacifist, or just some kind of weenie?” she asked him point-blank, revolver in fist.

  He didn’t respond to the question. He kept on slinking, putting distance between himself and potential trouble. He had learned in his second incarnation that it was usually safer to pretend to be deaf.

  These Deathlanders didn’t understand his deep moral dilemma. How could they? They had no inkling of his secret identity, of his terrible, unasked-for powers, his lifelong curse. Even if they understood everything and had command of all the scientific detail, he doubted that they would empathize with his plight. From what he’d seen of them so far, their propensity for violence, their unsophisticated code of justice, he was pretty sure they would shoot him in back of the head.

  There were two very good reasons why Daniel hadn’t picked up a gun from the rubble of the Upper Tween deck corridor. First, he didn’t fancy having his hands cut off with a machete. That’s exactly what would have happened if he was caught bearing arms against his masters. He had seen too many of the ritual hand-loppings close up. And sometimes he had been forced to gather up the vile things from the scuppers, no longer quivering, but still warm.

  The second reason had nothing to do with dire consequences. Though Daniel had made a meager living for years writing about firearms, he didn’t know how to use one. He had never shot an automatic weapon. He wasn’t sure of the correct way to hold one and certainly couldn’t load one, not if his life depended on it. The only “gun” he had ever fired shot BBs, a Daisy Red Ryder carbine, and even that wasn’t his. It had belonged to his cousin Arthur Junior. He hadn’t loaded or cocked the Red Ryder. Cousin Arthur had insisted on doing that for him, so he wouldn’t screw it up. Shooting the BB gun at pop bottles hadn’t impressed the young Daniel. Also, and more to the point, he hadn’t been able to hit anything, no matter how close the range. Cousin Arthur Junior’s cruel ongoing commentary on his marksmanship, or the lack thereof, undoubtedly contributed to his lack of enthusiasm for gun sport as an adult.

  The red-haired beauty called up the stairs to Eye Patch, letting him know they were in position.

  Daniel had trouble keeping his eyes off her. She was definitely hot: great body, long legs, gorgeous green eyes. The others in Eye Patch’s crew he found less appealing. The runt with glasses, the long-haired albino, the tall geezer with nice teeth, the mustache man, the hostile black woman with beaded plaits—to him they seemed like a cross between a rogue military unit and a renegade biker gang. They certainly lacked the style and sensibilities of the heroes of SR. Their language was coarse and brutal. They smelled unpleasant, too.

  He caught Garwood glaring at him. The teenager had a lot of anger in him over what had happened to his island, his family and his friends. Understandable anger. He needed somewhere to direct that rage, someone upon whom he could vent his fury.

  Daniel swallowed hard and averted his gaze. He carefully backed away to the side of a rusted-out control console, trying not to attract further attention to himself.

  At Eye Patch’s urging, Garwood led them around the rear of the engines and opened the hatch to the bilge. There was still nowhere for Daniel to run. Except for the hatch, the engine room was another dead end. When it came his turn, he backed through the hole and descended into the sulfurous darkness.

  It seemed like a long way down. He stepped off the last rung and into the oily bilge water. The light from the torches didn’t illuminate much. He could barely see the ceiling overhead, and the bilge walls were lost in the blackness.

  Daniel saw his opportunity. While the others stood around waiting for Eye Patch to join them, he backed up, slowly moving out of the ring of light cast by the torches. He retreated very carefully so as not to make splashes, his right arm stretched out behind him, feeling for obstacles. The torchlight dimmed with distance. Nobody seemed to notice his absence. Bilge water filled his boots and it got deeper. He was up to his knees in it when behind he felt the warm steel of the bilge wall.

  Crouching there, trying not to breathe too loudly, he could see Eye Patch backing through the bright circle of light that was the engine room hatch. Gunfire broke out and the clang of bullets hitting metal resounded in the darkness. Eye Patch slammed the hatch shut. In flickering torchlight he hurriedly climbed down the ladder.

  Daniel watched as the line of torches crossed the bilge. He could see they were running on a raised walkway, above the bilge water. The torch in front stopped moving and there was a loud scraping noise. Suddenly a wedge of brilliant light cut through the darkness, silhouetting the escapees. Daniel hunkered down lower in the bilge water, afraid the light would give him away.

  When the engine room hatch reopened, the last person in the line turned and opened fire. There were more clangs and much louder gun reports.

  Which were answered by a burst of autofire that ricocheted wildly through the enclosed space.

  A short string of single shots from the last person put an end to that.

  A tall figure ran into the wedge of light and Daniel saw it was Eye Patch. His pals were disap
pearing one by one through the hole in the hull.

  Movement and light up near the ceiling caught Daniel’s attention. He watched as the clutch of CS gas grenades dropped through the opening, and he knew what was coming next. The chilling was going to be nonselective. Anyone stricken by tear gas, staggering around in the bilge was dead meat.

  Before his eyes started watering, Daniel made his break. He sloshed around the perimeter, then crawled through the breach in the hull. As he stuck his head out, he saw Eye Patch cresting the top of the dune. Eye Patch didn’t look back.

  Daniel visualized the terrain leading down behind the ville to the water, specifically the open stretch between ship and shanties, which for a brief interval would leave the deserters visible and vulnerable.

  Seizing on the chance to further ingratiate himself in the eyes of his masters, Daniel stepped away from the hull, and without leaving the dish of dune, shouted up at the top deck as loud as he could.

  “¡Ay ya, los otros!”

  He waved his arms, pointed and kept on shouting the alert.

  From the deck high above him came the hollow pops of grenade launchers firing, then from over the top of the dune, he heard muffled whumps as projectile canisters exploded.

  “Yes!” he exclaimed in English, pumping his fist in the air.

  A gun barked from above and the bullet kicked up sand behind him, missing his shoulder and neck by no more than a half inch.

  As gren blasts continued to rain down on the escapees, Daniel threw back his head and cried, “¡Soy Daniel! ¡Soy cuentista del fuego!”

  Another guncrack, another bullet whined past his head. Thinking it was his accent, he repeated himself, spreading his arms in supplication and surrender.

  In reply, the shooter on the main deck opened up full-auto, forcing Daniel to duck back into the ship.