by Chuck Dixon
“A dangerous undertaking,” Taan said. “Perhaps even foolish.”
“Maybe you’d like to go along. Stretch your legs a little,” Morris said. He felt no affection for Taan after the way he’d been abducted and abused while the billionaire’s captive.
“I’m content to be an observer.”
“Yeah. Why get your shoes muddy?” Mo nodded down at Taan’s custom Italian loafers now showing wear after his time aboard the Raj.
“Believe me; I wish them success. I’m anxious to get back to my affairs. As fascinating as this trip has been.”
Morris said nothing in reply.
“I’m curious, though. About your device, doctor.”
“What about it?”
“Just how fine can you tune it? I mean, how accurately can you fix the time in which we will return?”
“I can usually manifest an opening within three weeks of the target. Sometimes closer. There are variables.”
Taan nodded. “More than I can imagine, I’m sure.”
“Why the sudden interest?”
“I only wanted a rough estimate of how much business I was missing out on.”
“I think the SSE can get along without you for a while.” The Shanghai Stock Exchange.
“You’re probably right.” Taan allowed himself a smile before wandering away.
Morris returned his attention to the men below. The engines started with a whine that fell away to a rumble. With a jerk, the lead raft towed the tank raft toward the shoreline invisible in the swallowing dark.
The drone sailed above the trees with an angry hornet buzz, following the course of the marshes toward the river bank.
Jimbo leaned over a pad at the prow of the Zodiac, watching a bird’s-eye view of the way ahead. The screen crawled with gnats that landed on the glowing surface. Next to him crouched Chaz, staring ahead through night vision goggles, M4 rifle ready and charged.
Despite the heat, they wore long sleeve shirts and long pants to discourage biting insects. All but Byrus, who went shirtless and barefoot as always. His one concession to modesty was a ragged pair of cargo shorts and, of course, a belt from which he could hang his sheathed gladius. Every inch of exposed flesh was slathered with greasy bug repellent. Clouds of gnats and nits and thumb-sized flies still followed them in an eddying fog. They hoped conditions would be better on land but suspected the misery quotient would remain much the same.
“A little to port, Boats. There’s a course through the reeds we can follow. Open water to target.”
“Fuck the reeds. What about any of those toothy motherfuckers?” Boats growled where he stood at the tiller. He slapped at a bottle fly that clung to his sleeve and wiped a handful of green guts on his pant leg.
“Switching to thermal,” Jimbo said.
The screen on the pad showed a few signatures off to their west. Large beasts glowed pumpkin colored against an indigo background. They were unmoving, down for the night. They looked at be herbivores from their shape. The same variety they’d seen grazing in the shallows throughout most of the previous day. Smaller flashes of warm colors flitted here and there. Birds hunting flying bugs in the night. The marsh ahead showed blue-black on the screen. No heat signatures were visible across the entire surface of open water between the reed islands.
“We’re good. No contact,” Jimbo said.
He glanced back to see the others seated behind him, guns at the ready. All wore NODs arrays, giving them bug eyes. All but Byrus whose eyes were bugging all on their own, the whites showing as he swiveled his head from side to side in search of krakens.
Jimbo guided Boats between obstacles of sandbars and vegetation to bring them to the edge of the marsh. They clambered out onto drier land and began offloading gear. Jimbo brought the drone down to save batteries but did not stow it away in its case. They’d be needing their eye in the sky again before this long day was over.
Byrus humped a heavy ammo box of magazines for the Savage. He followed Jimbo up to a raised spot on the bank where the Pima set up his overwatch post in a copse of barrel-shaped palms. Bat joined him as spotter and back-up gun. They left the big Savage in place and returned to the edge of the water to help get the remaining gear off the raft.
Boats dragged the tank raft closer to shore and secured it in place with lines and pegs. He then hooked the end of a heavy firehose line to the intake at the top.
“Now we hump this shit inland,” Boats said.
“Eyes open. Ears open. Check your sight lines.” Lee led the way; his M4 slung and a spool of heavy hose in each hand. Chaz and Shan followed with the same loads. Boats had the pump in a sack on his back and pulled a two-stroke generator and two-gallon gas can on a dolly behind him. The dolly’s wheels were switched out for bicycle tires to make the pull easier over the rough ground. The big SEAL was packing seventy pounds of gear and hauling a hundred more. He resisted offers to help share the load, gesturing with his head for the rest to get their asses up the trail pronto.
They moved off, single file, up the muddy slope. Boats cursed the whole way as the dolly’s wheels clotted with mud and slid rather than turned. Above them, redwoods towered against the sky, blocking out the stars. They marched into the deep shadows of the monster trees. Jimbo watched their progress through the scope on the Savage, eyes on the massive tree boles and deep darkness between.
Bat watched as well through a spotter scope. Lee turned back to give her a thumbs up. Soon the men were out of sight. “We’re gonna need a gallon of this shit,” Chaz said. He stopped on the trail to pull off his NODs. The night was giving way to pre-dawn gloom. He slapped more Deet gel on the back of his neck. Stinging gnats swarmed around him.
“They love that brown sugar, huh.” Boats humped toward him out of a waist-high cover of broad-leafed ferns.
“Man, I’d drink this shit if I thought it’d work.” Chaz replaced the squirt bottle in a pocket of his Molle vest and picked up the twin hoops of hose once more.
“Hold up.” Boats had come to the end of one of his spools. He took the end of one of Chaz’ and joined them together using a clamp wrench to make sure the connection was secure. He took the new spool from Chaz and gestured for the Ranger to march on.
“The farther we go, the lighter the load,” Boats said.
“The farther we go, the more things that can eat us,” Chaz said.
“I hear something,” Byrus said.
Jimbo took his eye from the scope and canted his head. “I hear a lot of somethings.” Jimbo shrugged.
“I’m trying not to imagine what I’m hearing,” Bat said.
The water behind them and woods above them were filled with a cacophony of tweets, honks, grunts, and caws. Beneath them, the constant thrum of insects provided a wavering leitmotif. The level of sound rose in direct relation to the rise of the sun over the water. The world of monsters waking up to a new day. Jimmy Smalls had lived on a Pima reservation until the day he joined the army. Most of his life was spent outdoors in forest, desert, and lake country. In all that time, he’d never been in an environment as alive as this one. Or one so damned noisy.
“Down in the water. I heard a splash.” Byrus rose to his knees, parting some fronds to look down at the marsh.
“Could be anything. A turtle maybe.” Jimbo realized that this was no comfort. They’d seen turtles the size of pickup trucks since they’d arrived here.
“There’s something in the water. Under the water.”
“I’ll take a lookie-loo.” Jimbo turned from the Savage to pick up the drone controller.
The drone came to life with a chirp and leapt into the air over them. Jimbo piloted it over the marsh. The lens was set to thermal. The water showed up indigo with flashes of pale gold here and there. Fish. Not even monster fish.
“Got some trout or bass in there. Flintstone size but nothing we need to worry about.”
“Yabba dabba doo,” Byrus said under his breath. He was an avid TV watcher and knew all about Bedrock and its denizens
. In fact, in their current situation, he was missing Netflix more than any other modern comfort. The video library on the Raj ran to porn and Bollywood, favorites of the crew. There were a few Charles Bronson movies, but Byrus had practically memorized them by now.
Jimbo recalled the drone. It hovered over them. From below, they heard a churn of water followed by the slap of chop that made the reeds brush against one another.
“That was something big,” Bat said.
“Okay. I heard that too.” Jimbo sent the drone back over the water. Still no readings. No heat signatures on the shore or in the water. Even the fish were gone now. Just dead water. Byrus stood and looked down at the glassy surface. Ripples spanned all the way to the shore where they raised a muddy foam. Nothing broke the surface. It was a momentary shift in the mirror plane of water.
“Could be anything. All kinds of tectonic activity going on. What it’s not is an animal.” Jimbo brought the drone back to land by them atop its carry case. Byrus took a seat, cross-legged, by him.
“Where are the men of this world? We have seen no one,” Byrus said after a moment.
“There are no men here. There won’t be for a very long time.”
“Not in the entire world?”
“Nowhere. No men. No women. No cities. Just what you’re looking at here from one end of the world to the other.”
Byrus thought on this as he watched his shadow lengthen in the dawn light. So much of the new world he’d adopted took his attention from the larger questions. There was television and automobiles and airplanes and telephones and all the magic of technology and science that were everyday events to his new friends but a constant wonder to the Macedonian. The microwave oven was as much a revelation to him as learning that the Earth was actually round and that men had walked on the Moon. This world of amazements and conveniences was seductive. He was aware that he could lose himself, become soft over time in a place where even the humblest man had all the comforts of a Caesar. Among Byrus’ many blessings was that he was brought to this place by hard men, warriors, who could indulge in pleasures without surrendering their spirit. They lived in civilization and were of civilization but as wolves rather than dogs.
“There was the time of the titans, then the time of the gods, and then the time of man,” he said after a bit. “This is none of those times. A time before any other time.”
“Yeah, bro. That’s why we call it prehistory. This is all before history began,” Jimbo said.
“Right, bro.” The Macedonian nodded, satisfied.
Out on the black water, the first pair of eyes breached the still surface, glowing copper in the reflected sunlight.
11
Tenochtitlán
They crossed rivers and followed trails through desert, forests, and grassland. As they traveled, they were joined by more raiding parties. The force of warriors reached close to fifty. The slaves numbered over two hundred. Weeks of walking brought the slave train to the center of Aztec power at the southern foot of the central plateau.
As they hiked south, Dwayne coaxed Heather to teach him some of her language. She pointed out things as they walked and named each in her consonant heavy tongue. Sky. Bird. Grass. Dwayne memorized them all and asked for more. At camp each night, he listened to the men speaking around the fire. Cups of mezcal encouraged them to tell stories. Grand gestures and exaggerated voices drew laughter or derision from the others. Guys bullshitting around a fire. Some things never change. Dwayne sat close, listening for inflection and phrase construction. It wasn’t easy. The way they spoke bore no relation to any other language he knew.
Over the long days of walking and nights about the fire, Dwayne picked up a rudimentary command of the simpler aspects of Nahuatl. He tried a few sentences on Heather. She was startled to hear him speaking to her in familiar words. After her initial surprise, she grinned at his child-like fumbles and corrected some of his gaffes.
Listening to conversations of others, he was able to understand the basics of his place here with these raiders. He was a prized possession, a kind of living oddity like an albino tiger. Black Mask was anxious to get him home. Finding a white giant covered with skin pictures would make Black Mask a big man in Aztecland. Dwayne wasn’t sure what that meant for him.
He knew he wasn’t anxious for this long march to end. The game trail of packed earth gave way to a broad roadway paved with stones. It was an ancient engineering marvel and ran straight as a string between cultivated fields of amaranth and corn. A half day’s march on the stone surface and the peaks of pyramids rose into sight at the end of the road.
Dwayne noticed that weeds grew between the paving blocks. In other places, rain had washed the ballast away, leaving the roadway to collapse. There were also signs that paving blocks had been removed by thieves. Once an object of pride, this road of kings had fallen into disrepair and neglect.
Collapsed adobe huts and fallow fields dense with brush gave further evidence of a society whose best days were in the past. What he thought were neat rows of grain and maize were revealed to be haphazard plantings as they marched closer. Probably more the result of natural reseeding than planned agriculture. Filthy children came to the roadside to watch the parade of animals and men pass by. Many had swollen bellies below ribs visible through skin like paper. There was famine here; Dwayne had seen it before. And disease. Many of the children had running sores and rheumy eyes. Rather than show compassion, the warriors walking escort swung weapons at them and shouted to chase them away from the roadway.
The city must have been a thriving community at one time in its past. Paved roads ran out from the center like spokes of a wheel. What once were probably neighborhoods of neat homes of white-washed adobe were now collections of sagging shacks surrounded by acres of rubble. The walls of the brick homes now provided shelter for skin tents and shacks of woven reeds. Smoke spread from community dome ovens to create a fog between the buildings. The stink of the smog covered the smell of feces and corruption that rose from the densely packed hovels.
Desperate-looking peons came out of the shadows of the huts to line the road and watched the procession pass with hollow eyes. Dwayne noticed an astonishing number of missing limbs and eyes. These were sights he’d seen before in Third World countries in the throes of civil war. Whatever strides the Aztecs had made in the past had been erased by dissolution, conflict, and some brand of societal rot.
They reached the foot of the long causeway that crossed Lake Texcoco and led to the sacred city itself. The pyramids and multi-story buildings were impressive as seen from a distance across the water. But, as the slave train drew closer, Dwayne saw that the paint on the structures was faded and peeling. The steps of the largest pyramid were choked with vines. Much of the city was overgrown. The canals that cut across the island stronghold were green with algae and choked with reeds. Skiffs and canoes lay half sunk in the unmoving brackish soup. Mosquitoes moved in clouds across the still surface.
A gaggle of aged men stepped from the foot of the largest pyramid to meet Black Mask and his entourage. They were bent nearly double under the weight of their ornate headdresses of bone, wood, and feathers. The slave train was formed into a ragged line for the old priests to inspect. They poked and prodded the slaves, inspecting hands and teeth, pinching muscles. Heavy muscled goons shouldering war clubs walked with the old men to make sure the slaves behaved. The priests stopped before a man who was bent double, wracked with a painful wet cough. A priest took a brush from a pot in his hand and marked the man with a daub of yellow paint on the chest.
He did the same for other men down the line. A slave with running sores on his leg. Another with a twisted knee. These men were cut away from the others and dragged clear of the line by the goons before having their brains dashed out with blows from the stone-headed clubs. The rank of slaves stood and watched. They were broken men with no loyalty left for those in their company. They watched placidly as their comrades were executed, content that they were not chosen.<
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Black Mask clapped hands and called orders to some of his crew. They brought leather bags of cargo from the pack horses. Black Mask spilled the contents of the bags to the dust. It was junk they’d picked up along the way south. Other raiders did the same. Soon there were heaps of loot waiting for the priests’ inspection.
Dwayne could see some metal pots, a comb, something that looked like chain mail. There was a dagger or two and a painted earthenware jug. And Dwayne’s equipment belt with the revolver, automatic, and needle gun that he hadn’t seen since being taken prisoner.
The priests examined the goodies piled up for them. They poked through the mass, picking up objects, commenting on some. A great deal of attention was paid to Dwayne’s weapons. One of the old guys held the revolver in palsied hands and put an eye to the end of the barrel. Dwayne made a silent prayer that the ancient fucker would blow his own brains out. A priest made a gesture to one of the goons, who roared a command back toward the pyramid.
A line of young women, naked except for sashes of white cloth, came from the shadows of a low entrance. Each had a basket of woven reeds atop their heads. With the priests fussing over them, the girls loaded the baskets with the loot.
Black Mask took Dwayne by the arm and pulled him forward. The priests gathered to look the tall stranger over, making cooing and clucking noises. Just as Heather had done, they touched his tattoos with hesitation. Powerful medicine. They stood open-mouthed in amazement when Black Mask pulled Dwayne’s head lower and pulled his lips up to reveal even white teeth. The priests’ own teeth, what was left of them, were worn black nubs in swollen gums.
One of the priests, a wizened little bastard with skin like parchment and a headdress in the shape of a crow, noticed the silver bracelet dangling from Black Mask’s wrist. He touched it with spindly fingers and began tugging on it. Black Mask resisted at first until one of the priests’ goons stepped forward with a grunt. He surrendered the bracelet with barely hidden regret. The old priest slid the bracelet onto his skinny arm where it swung easily on his spindly wrist.
