Читать книгу Dark Resurrection - James Axler - Страница 11

“It turns out you’re famous here, too, lover,” Krysty said to Ryan’s back. “They’ve got your head on a stick.”

“It’s not me,” the one-eyed warrior countered. “It’s ass backward.”

As the lead tug slipped in alongside the pier, with the other two tugs following close behind, raucous, rhythmic music blasted from speakers bolted to the light stanchions. When the crews hurried to tie off the mooring lines and extend the short gangways, the waiting crowd really came unglued; Ryan could hardly hear himself think for all the noise.

Up close, the size and frenzy of the mob gave even him pause. For the first time in three weeks of captivity, Ryan caught himself thinking that maybe they weren’t going to make it out of this alive, after all. It was a thought he couldn’t come to grips with, and instinctively smothered.

Then the pirates started laying on the lash to make the terrified slaves rise from their benches.

Whipped hard across the shoulders from behind, J.B. lurched to his feet, his face twisted in outrage. For a second, Ryan’s old battlemate lost all semblance of control. He jerked at his chains like an animal, trying desperately, futilely, to break free, to get his hands on his grinning, dreadlocked tormentor.

At least J.B. wasn’t pissing himself, which is more than Ryan could say for some of the other slaves around them. The Padre Islander kid, Garwood Reed, looked stunned, frozen like a jacklit rabbit. The companions had done their best to protect him during the torturous journey—though young the orphaned boy had proved himself in battle—but apart from their each giving up a bit of the scant rations to keep him going there was little to be done. “Stay close to me, son,” Ryan told the teen. “No matter what happens, stay close….”

Ryan felt it was his responsibility to get the companions clear of this mess, somehow, some way, but as things stood that feat was impossible. Looking at the mob, he knew he couldn’t keep his friends from being torn limb from limb, if that’s the croaking that fate held in store.

For their part, never had J.B., Krysty and Jak been confronted by so many agitated people at one time. In Deathlands a big crowd might be a couple of hundred souls. Krysty’s prehensile hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm. The expression in Jak’s bloodred eyes was unreadable; the albino had retreated somewhere deep inside his own head. Mildred and Doc, both born in earlier eras, before Armageddon’s large-scale population cull, had experience with masses of humanity. And Ryan who had been kidnapped to Shadow World, a parallel earth where the profusion of people had overrun all other forms of life, was no virgin when it came to mob scenes. However, none of them had ever been the focus of such furious and overwhelming attention.

Flogged until they all got to their feet, the rowers were linked ankle to ankle and then driven toward the waiting gangplanks.

As Ryan and the companions edged forward to the tug’s gate, he saw men in red sashes and straw hats pounding back the crowd with cudgels and the metal-shod butts of sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns. The sec men swinging clubs carried fold-stock, 9 mm submachine guns on slings over their shoulders. With brute force, they opened a lane in the packed bodies to three stake trucks that were idling on the pier. The sec men held the path open with difficulty. As spectators surged forward, they had to be beaten back.

When Ryan stepped into view on the gangplank, the mob on either side went crazy, pointing at him, jumping up and down. They started up a chant.

“¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”

“¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”

“¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”

Krysty leaned forward and hollered in his ear, “Didn’t I say you were famous!”

“What are they saying? What’s it mean?” Ryan shouted at Mildred.

“Damned if I know!” she shouted back. “It’s not Spanish!”

A superamplified voice, syrupy-smooth and talking a mile a minute, bellowed through a megaphone mounted atop the roof of the lead truck’s cab. The rapid-fire speech was backed by recorded accordion, drums and trumpets gone wild—which competed with the other music pouring out of the pier’s speakers.

At blasterpoint, Ryan, his battlemates and young Reed were forced to climb into the back of the first stake truck. Like the other two vehicles, it was aimed toward the city center. When the bed was crammed full of slaves, thirty or so in all, a sec man slammed shut the wooden rear gate. The remaining trucks were likewise loaded and locked.

Red-sashed sec men surrounded the vehicles, laboring to keep the crowd from surging forward and overrunning the prisoners. The companions had automatically moved back to back, in a tight defensive ring. Garwood Reed did as he’d been told: he stuck to Ryan’s side like glue.

All three trucks gunned their engines and started honking for the mob to make way. Nobody budged. And there were too many people on the pier for the vehicles to force the issue.

Then the Matachìn started trooping off the tugs and onto the dock. They advanced in a tight, military formation with their commander, the guy with the tallest piled dreads and the most pillaged jewelry, marching in the lead.

When the assembled people of Veracruz saw the pirates in full battle gear and weapons bearing down on them, they made tracks backward. And they did something else that surprised the hell out of Ryan. Those closest to the Matachìn immediately dropped to their knees and pressed their noses and foreheads to the concrete. There wasn’t room on the dock for all of the people to prostrate themselves. Those who couldn’t bow down retreated as far from the pirates as they could, opening a narrow path for the trucks down the middle of the pier.

The pecking order of the men with blasters was established immediately, Ryan noted. The red sashes standing next to the truck whipped off their hats, knelt, and lowered their heads before High Pile, the Matachìn commander. One of them, probably the most senior-ranking, kneaded the brim of his cowboy hat as he spoke and then pointed up at Ryan. His words were lost in the din, but a smile spread over the captain’s greasy face.

High Pile jumped onto the lead truck’s running board, reached through the open passenger window and snatched the microphone from a suddenly struck-mute public address announcer.

“¡La guerra está terminada!” His voice boomed over the recorded music tape loop, boomed over the crowd. “¡Victoria eterna para los reyes de la muerte! ¡Los gemelos heroicos son cautivos!”

The commander repeated the same words over and over, and with every repetition the mob sent up a louder cheer.

“Now, that ’s in Spanish!” Mildred exclaimed.

The companions huddled closer to hear what else she had to say.

“He’s telling them the war is over,” Mildred translated for them. “Eternal victory for the Kings of Death—or maybe the Lords of Death. And the hero twins are captives.”

“Hero twins?” Krysty said.

“It could be a mythological reference, from ancient Mayan,” Mildred said. “I sort of vaguely remember the term—something to do with their creation story, I think. More than a century ago I did some reading to get ready for an archaeological tour of the major Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala. How the phrase applies here and now is beyond me.”

The truck and its human cargo began to roll slowly forward. Out in front, the Matachìn phalanx parted the crowd with unspoken threat. Ryan watched as a wave of prostration broke before them. Regular folk and red sashes alike supplicated themselves, pressing their faces into the ground. This wasn’t a community of equals welcoming home their best and brightest after a successful military campaign; this was a subject people, paying homage.

The convoy proceeded at a walking pace off the pier, past the lighthouse and into the canyon of city streets. High Pile rode the running board, megaphone-assaulting the seemingly endless throng with his news.

Ryan tried to read the sea of brown faces. Mixed in with the overall jubilance, with the mind-numbing cheers, with the legions of fingers pointing excitedly up at him, he saw here and there flickers of shock and even sorrow. The selection of jigged, giant heads-on-sticks was the same as on the pier: there were kings or demons, plague rictus masks and mirror-images of his own bearded visage.

The convoy crawled through a right turn, proceeded a few more blocks and then made a left.

On Ryan’s right, three-and four-story colonial buildings loomed above the narrow street. The wall-to-wall facades were painted in bright pastels—aqua, pink, gold—and draped with spotlighted red banners: stories-long, paint-on-cloth portraits of the array of ferocious kings—or devils. Atapuls I through X varied in skin color and texture, as well as headdress design and height, width of nose, length of extended tongue, and position and shape of fangs.

From every floor, people hung over the Moorishly arched, pillared balconies; some threw brilliantly colored confetti into the air, which fluttered down onto the heads and shoulders of the Matachìn phalanx. Lights burned in every window. At street level, the buildings opened up into cavelike arcades packed with markets and shops. The sidewalks were jammed with spectators and carts, spill-over retail that included hot food, cold drinks, live poultry, cigars and rack after rack of new clothing.

The other side of the avenue was lined with people and hawkers’ carts, too, but there were no buildings, just a row of tall, skinny trees that marked the border of a broad, central park. The park’s pavement was made up of checkerboard marble tiles in white, gray and black. On the other side of the square, high above the tops of the trees, stood the floodlit bell tower of a predark cathedral. It dominated the square, glowing in the lights like an ember, fiery red against the night sky.

As the trucks crept forward, Ryan picked up distinctive odors by turns—camellias, spices, incense, fresh-baked bread, charcoal smoke and grilled meats. This was nothing like Shadow World. That place had been stripped bare by insatiable human appetites, like the ruins of a cornfield after a swarm of locusts. Veracruz was the exact opposite of the parallel earth: it was ripe, fecund, teeming with energy.

“Oh, my God!” Mildred exclaimed, pointing toward the ground floor of one of the buildings with both manacled hands.

“What?” Ryan said.

“It’s a Burger King!” was her cryptic reply.

Further explanation was interrupted by a barrage of garbage. As the trucks came directly under the balconies, the folks up there stopped throwing confetti and started throwing rotten fruit, to the applause of the surrounding mob. The slaves ducked and covered as overripe mango and papaya splattered the bed of the trucks and their defenseless backs.

The volley let up only after the convoy had crawled out of range.

When their truck rounded a corner, Ryan could see it wasn’t the tint of the spotlights that made the cathedral look red; it was painted top to bottom the color of dried blood.

Or maybe it was blood.

The mob packing the cathedral steps broke apart before the wedge of Matachìn. The three-truck convoy stopped. High Pile hopped down from the running board and climbed up to the stone altar that blocked the cathedral’s main entrance. Pungent clouds of incense poured from brass censers on either side of the arched doorway.

An old man with a sagging, deeply seamed face waited for him behind the dished out altar. His headdress was made of scrolled posts and cross-members of gold-painted wood. His brocaded, crimson robe didn’t hide skinny arms and legs, and a round, protruding belly—he looked like a hairless brown spider playing dress-up.

Ryan noticed that while everybody else retreated with their noses pressed to ground, the spider remained upright, as if he and the commander were equal in rank.

Pirate and high priest conferred head-to-head for a moment in the cathedral’s entryway, then with a flourish, the priest unsheathed a long, golden dagger that he held over his head and turned for all to see. The captain shouted an order down to his men. Five Matachìn immediately and gleefully swarmed over the sides of the lead stake truck, jumping down into the midst of the chained slaves.

The pirates booted aside the prisoners, moving with purpose in the same direction, toward Ryan and the others.

“Together now,” the one-eyed warrior growled as the Matachìn bore down on them in a blitz attack.

Things happened very quickly in the narrow space between the fence walls of the stake truck—close quarters that temporarily negated the pirates’ advantage in mobility and firepower.

The companions’ three weeks of fury, suffering and frustration exploded in violence.

J.B. jumped forward, howling, to meet and block the rush of the first of the on-coming pirates.

The much bigger attacker tried to bowl him aside with a well-timed shoulder strike. The strike missed by an inch or two when the Armorer spun away, and the pirate kept coming, stumbling forward off balance.

From behind, Ryan threw his manacled hands over the top of the nasty dreads, pulling the connecting chain down over the filthy face, down around the unprotected throat. Then he crossed his wrists, pulling the chain tight under the man’s chin and making links dig deep into his flesh. The pirate tried frantically to buck him off, but Ryan wouldn’t allow it. By shifting his weight, he kept the man off balance, even as his face turned darker and darker purple.

Sputtering for breath, the pirate reached to his hip for the handle of his machete. As the long, wide blade cleared its scabbard, Ryan gave the chain a vicious twist. There was momentary resistance to the turn, then the neck snapped and the head lolled over onto the left shoulder. Suddenly, Ryan was supporting the full weight of a twitching body. As Ryan un-crossed his wrists, letting his stinking captive fall, Jak snatched the machete from the dead hand.

Two pirates rushed in from the other side with whips cocked back. Mildred and Doc raised cuffed hands to keep from being lashed across the face, and braced to absorb the punishment and protect the emaciated teen behind them.

“It’s the boy!” Mildred shouted to the others over the cheers of the crowd. “They don’t want us, they want the boy!”

Jak was already in motion, coiled like a steel spring, the gut-hook machete almost dragging the bed floor as he maximized momentum. The chop when it came was far too fast to follow—an arcing, angled blow that landed behind the nearest pirate’s right knee. The machete’s edge cleaved deep into bone but the battle armor shin guard kept it from slicing all the way through. The blade stuck fast, and the weapon was jerked free of Jak’s hand as the pirate leaped backward. When the man’s full weight came down, the weakened bone gave way with an audible crack.

The pirate screamed and fell over backward, clawing at his newly fashioned, blood-jetting stump, and before the second attacker could jump away, Mildred and Doc were on him. Mildred grabbed hold of the end of the whip. Doc smashed him across the face with both hands locked, like he was swinging a baseball bat or an ax. As the man staggered back half a step, Doc seized him around the front of the throat, driving him into the wall of the stake truck. Displaying a reservoir of strength and the bottomless depth of his anger, the Victorian time-traveler lifted the 180-pound pirate up on his tiptoes as he strangled him, two-handed. Doc absorbed the man’s frantic punches and kicks, his excellent teeth bared in a terrible, triumphant grin.

The two other pirates closed on the companions with their machetes drawn. Ryan and J.B. met the downward slashes on the chains that connected their wrists, steel scraping on steel. Ryan ripped the machete away, sending it flying over his shoulder and out of the truck. Because of his rib injury, J.B. didn’t have the strength to tear his trapped blade away, but it didn’t matter. He kept it tied up long enough for Krysty and Jak to join the fray. They shoulder-rammed the pirates off their feet, and when the men landed on the truck bed the payback for twenty-one days of hell began in earnest. Concentrating on the unarmored heads, the companions did their damnedest with bootheels, shattering and scattering jawbones and teeth, sending blood and then skull and brains squirting in all directions.

As the companions regrouped around the Reed boy, the rest of the pirate phalanx scrambled onto the truck. Ryan and his comrades fought in a frenzy, but hobbled by the bodies of the other slaves they were chained to, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers, it was a lost cause from the start. After a couple of minutes they began to fall, one by one, under the rain of blows. Ryan was the last to drop, struck in the head and neck simultaneously. As more blows pounded him to the deck, he felt the boy torn from his grasp.

In a second he was back on his feet, but the anchor of the other slaves he was chained to kept him from jumping out of the truck in pursuit.

Jak, J.B., Krysty, Mildred and Doc rose bloodied from the stake truck bed. They watched through the wall slats as the Matachìn carried young Garwood fighting and thrashing up the steps to the altar. They pinned him on his back in the middle of the ancient stone slab, his arms and legs spread wide. With one hand the spider priest tore open the boy’s ragged T-shirt, the other hand held the golden dagger.

“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.

But there was no mercy on offer this night.

The priest raised the ceremonial dagger in both hands, poised to strike downward, into the defenseless chest.

Garwood Reed didn’t beg for his life; he didn’t shame himself. A true son of Deathlands, he reared back his head and spit full in the priest’s face. That he could work up the necessary gob of spit under the circumstances spoke volumes as to his courage and his fortitude.

Without bothering to wipe away the spittle, the priest drove home the blade.

The boy went rigid on the altar.

A practiced, circular stroke opened a yawning hole beneath the sternum, and Garwood’s body suddenly relaxed. The boy was already dead when the priest plunged a hand into the cavity past the wrist, rooted around for a moment, and then jerked out a handful of dripping red flesh.

The heart.

The priest raised the gory hunk of muscle to his mouth. He sucked a mouthful of blood from one of its severed vessels then spit it out. He sucked and spit four times, in each of the ordinal directions. Crimson rivulets drooled off his chin.

It was a blessing of some unspeakable kind.

“Why him?” Krysty gasped. “Why did the bastards take him? ”

“Because he was the youngest of the captured slaves,” Mildred said, her eyes brimming with tears. “The young ones are probably the most prized as sacrifices to the demons they worship.”

“Or are forced to worship,” Ryan said.

Looking around, he saw the stigma of the foul religion at every turn. The color of the church. The sashes of the armed sec men. The robes of the murderer priest. The banners hanging down the fronts of the buildings. When you were outnumbered big-time, organized terror was the only way to control a subject people. Mebbe this place wasn’t so different than Deathlands, after all, he thought. The barons enforced their tyranny and extracted obedience with violence and fear. If there was a difference here, it was in scale and sophistication.

“There will be hell to pay for this abomination,” Doc swore, his pale blue eyes blazing with fury, his teeth stained red with his own blood. “By the Three Kennedys, there will surely be hell to pay….”

Drenched with sweat from the fighting, Ryan struggled to catch his breath in the seething, humid air. The red sashes all around the convoy were jumping up and down, waving their clubs, working themselves into a dither over the sacrifice. Their chill frenzy spilled into and infected the surrounding crowds. Pretty soon everyone was jumping up and down, and yelling blue murder.

A civilian suddenly darted through the line of red sashes and jumped into the back of the stake truck before anyone could stop him. His eyes looked bloodshot and squirrelly, like he was strung out on jolt. He had a long, thin-bladed knife clasped between his teeth, the sharp edge pointing away from his lips. Whipping the knife from his jaws, with an animal cry, he charged for Ryan.

The reveller intended to do a little sacrificing himself, maybe grab some of glory of the moment.

Ryan easily deflected the too-slow lunge with his manacled wrists and delivered a cracking head butt. Blood gushed from the man’s crushed nose, but it was already lights out, squirrelly eyes rolling back in his skull. Doc, Mildred and Jak seized hold of the attacker’s arms and legs and threw him out of the truck. The red sashes swarmed in and pulled the unconscious man away.

They were still beating him into the pavement when High Pile hopped back on the running board and the trucks resumed their slow-speed parade. They drove past a railroad terminal, obviously long-abandoned. From there the convoy followed the road’s curve onto the peninsula. Behind them, the mob followed, clogging the street curb to curb. It trailed them for what Ryan guessed was close to two miles. Then the trucks turned off the road and parked on a stone quay between a row of stone buildings and the edge of the bay.

Forty feet away, across the water, was the old Spanish fort. Bright lights aiming down from notches in the battlements illuminated a low, pedestrian bridge that connected the fort to the quay.

The captives were shoved out of the stake trucks and forced to line up beside them. At High Pile’s order, the Matachìn disconnected Ryan from the file, pulled him from the ranks and pushed him to the bridge.

It appeared he was the slave of honor.

The far end of the bridge terminated at the point of one of the ravelins. The diamond-shaped projection, three-stories of windowless, weathered limestone block, stuck out from the fort’s perimeter. Ryan could see a narrow archway at the bridge’s end, and an open wrought-iron gate.

Urged forward at blasterpoint onto the bridge, Ryan glanced over the side. In the lights from the battlements he saw bones. Human bones in the crystal-clear water. The bottom was carpeted with mounds of them. Stripped white, jumbled skulls, long bones, ribs. There were darker blotches, too, and they were moving sideways. Crabs the size of dinner plates crawled over the piles of naked bones, looking for a snippet that the others had missed.

Fat, happy crabs.