Читать книгу Plague Lords - James Axler - Страница 10

Under the wide brim of a straw planter’s hat, Okie Moore squinted through rubber-armored minibinocs. Behind him, fixed to the rusting rail, a tattered, homemade Lone Star flag snapped in the onshore breeze. From his vantage point atop the Yoko Maru’s radar mast—some twelve stories above the main deck, five stories above the roof of the wheelhouse, almost four hundred feet above ground—he could see twenty nautical miles. The cheap Taiwanese optics were never quite in focus—if one eye was sharp, the other was slightly blurred—but they were good enough to spot a telltale blip along the seam between white-capped Gulf and cloudless blue sky. So far, there was nothing to see, but the combination of fuzzy images and the glare of the midday sun had given him the beginnings of a monumental headache. It felt like someone had inserted a flexible steel rod up his right nostril and then corkscrewed it through his sinus passages until the pointy tip bored into the nerves behind his eyeball.

Okie hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, not since the trader’s sloop beating in from the southwest had dropped sail and coasted slowly through the sheltered anchorage on the Corpus side of the island, the black plastic, trash bag pennants on its headstay fluttering like dying crows. From the cockpit, through a megaphone, the skipper shouted a warning to the beach and the handful of moored ships. The three-man crew had seen Browns ville from a distance. It was a funeral pyre, set alight by the Matachìn.

Until that moment, only droolies had taken the Fire Talker’s stories seriously.

“How long ago?” someone along the shore had shouted back.

“Four days.”

“Stop!” the islanders cried. “Stop! Heave to!”

The sloop continued coasting east, the captain steering with one hand and holding the megaphone in the other.

“Are the pirates coming this way?” Okie had bellowed, running along the sand to keep up.

“Who knows?” was the reply. “Could be a day behind, or three hours behind. Or mebbe they took their spoils south. Not sticking around to find out. If you got any brains, you won’t, either.” The skipper tossed down the megaphone, and to his waiting crew he snarled the order “Up sail!”

The sheets filled with a resounding whipcrack and the ship accelerated away. The captain never once looked back.

The three predark vessels moored in the cove began immediate, frantic preparations to weigh anchor. Ignoring the shouts and curses of the islanders, the ships’ crews had pushed half-loaded dinghies from the beach and rowed away. The only evacuation on the traders’ minds was their own. As soon as the dinghies had been hoisted aboard, without even stowing cargoes belowdecks, the two battered Tartans and the Catalina winched up their hooks, raised all sails and left the Padre Islanders to meet their fate.

After the observation and blasterposts that ringed the perimeter had been alerted, the heads of the Nuevo-Texican founding families and their lieutenants, Okie included, met in emergency session in the Yoko Maru’s windowless galley. They had planned to dump the Fire Talker on the mainland shore that very day. Now they didn’t dare. There were unanswered questions about how he had managed to reach Padre so quickly on foot. If he was a pirate spy, and they turned him loose, he could report back on the island’s fortifications and armament. Some of the headmen wanted to chill him at once, just to be safe, but when a vote of hands was taken they were in the minority. The majority decided it was better to keep him alive and close, as he might give away an impending attack, either inadvertently or under torture.

The Nuevo-Texicans had beaten back invaders on many occasions in their short, violent history, usually before the bastards even set foot on the beach. Streams of triangulated blasterfire from strategically placed blasterposts took an unholy toll on shore landings. The islanders were proud of their fighting spirit and resilience; moreover, they were supremely confident in their battle prowess. Their chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, borrowed from their nuke-fried ancestors, was “Bring it on!” Though they lived amid the unthinkable consequences of that philosophy, the irony was lost on them.

The threat of long-distance shelling by the Matachìn meant their normal defensive tactics went out the window. They couldn’t count on the blasterposts surviving a high-explosive barrage from offshore. The only hardened, defensible structure on the island was the cargo ship itself. In stacked containers and vast belowdecks holds, it held virtually all of the islanders’ wealth.

After a brief discussion, the headmen had decided that if and when the enemy was sighted, they would withdraw the island’s population to the freighter, and make the attackers take it, deck by deck, bulkhead by bulkhead. If the Matachìn shelled the ship to break the resistance, they’d destroy everything they came for, and waste precious ammunition in the process.

Absentmindedly scratching an angry cluster of mosquito bites on the inside of his wrist, Okie turned on the platform and gazed down on the foredeck, at lines of people carrying valuables and food into the ship, and heading back empty-handed for more. A natural incline made of compacted, wind-driven sand led from the beach to the portside gangway. Before the pirates landed, and after everyone was on board, they would blow it up, forcing the Matachìn to use grappling hooks and ladders to reach the top deck. Which would put them squarely into the kill zones of the firing ports staggered along the hull. The narrow slits hacked into the steel were just big enough for ramp and post sights and blasterbarrels.

Looking down over the crow’s nest rail, feeling the rickety platform sway under him in the wind, Okie had an awful surge of vertigo. Heights normally never bothered him; they certainly never made him want to vomit. Putting it down to too little sleep and food, and too much frantic activity, he shut his eyes for a moment and concentrated on breathing deeply and evenly through his mouth.

When the whirling sensation passed, Okie once again peered through the binocs, scanning the lines of people filtering between stacked cargo containers for his two hugely pregnant wives. He didn’t see either of them, or any of his six kids. Everybody who could fire a blaster was carrying one. Women and the older children wore AKs and sawedoff pump shotguns slung across their backs. There were no tear-streaked faces, no quivering lower lips. The islanders, to a person, were jut-jaw defiant.

They had all heard other Fire Talkers’ stories about the Matachìn, selected, fragmented details that were, of course, calculated to entertain and raise the short hairs. There was no way of telling if any of them were true, or how much the facts had been exaggerated.

It was rumored that the pirates all carried machetes with razor-sharp cane hooks at their tips—gut rippers. It was said they used the heavy blades to chop off any hands raised against them. After cauterizing the fresh stumps with torches so their captives wouldn’t bleed to death, they nailed the severed appendages in pairs to the ramparts of conquered villes, palm outward in a gesture and symbol of permanent submission.

It was rumored that they made the subjected people kneel whenever they passed, kneel with noses and foreheads pressed firmly into the dirt. It was said they wore glittering garlands of looted gold jewelry entwined in their matted dreadlocks and around their scarred boot tops. Apparently, they never washed themselves, either.

Never.

Stink was their religion. Pong was their manifesto.

According to the stories, some of the Matachìn wore bright, floral frocks over their blood-stained trousers and boots, shoulder-seam–split trophies ripped from the women they had ravaged and murdered.

According to the Fire Talkers, the Matachìn indulged in bloody and brutal ritual spectacles; they had established an extensive slave trade along the Atlantic coast of Mexico and Central America; they worked their captives to death in their agricultural fields and gaudies; and to amuse themselves during long sea voyages the pirate crews choreographed and staged slave fights to the death.

The common denominator in all the Fire Talker variations was death, unpleasant and prolonged.

Down in the ville, islanders were still gathering up everything of value, including excess stockpiles of food and fresh water. The water they couldn’t move, they dumped onto the sand. The idea was to leave the pirates nothing to eat or drink. The Nuevo-Texicans were well prepared for a long siege. They had the entire storehouse of the Yoko Maru at their disposal. The pirates had only whatever they brought along with them. Assuming the islanders could hold the ship for the duration, sooner or later problems of resupply would drive the Matachìn back to whatever hell-hole had spawned them.

The possibility did exist that the pirates had taken their fill of spoils in Browns ville, that they weren’t coming north, after all. But that wasn’t something the islanders could count on. Even as the residents crisscrossed between the ville and the Yoko Maru, explosive charges were being laid in the narrow, winding paths between the shanties. The predark Claymore mines with their payloads of steel ball bearings wouldn’t be trip-wired and armed until the enemy came into view and the last of the women and children were safely onboard the ship.

Okie raised the binocs, taking in the bow of the vessel. Surrounded by a rapt, deck-seated audience, the Fire Talker was perched on a bitt, waving his arms and talking animatedly.

Giving the droolies more to slobber about, no doubt.

The islanders’ usual practice was to securely tether the triple stupes, staking them at least three yards apart to keep them from playing hide the slime eel. When droolies mated with droolies of the opposite sex, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: more droolies. In camps elsewhere in the Deathlands, these unfortunates were not so tenderly cared for. The moment the symptoms surfaced—the slack lower jaw and vacant stare—heads were smashed in. The Nuevo-Texicans kept their little flock alive, not out of compassion or a sense of parental duty, but because the droolies were so damned amusing, even if the camp dogs failed to get the joke. Having someone around visibly more messed up than you were had another benefit, as well. It made a person feel instantly better about him or herself. “At least I’m not a droolie,” was the unspoken but ever present refrain.

Okie was struck by a sudden chill that started at the base of his spine and rippled up his back and neck, and crab-crawled over the top of his scalp. Which he found very strange, given the air temperature even with the wind was in the high eighties. As the shudder passed through him, the steel rod behind his eye probed deeper into the nerve bundle. He saw bright, dancing spots of light and once again felt the urge to spew. Worse, there was a simultaneous, uncomfortable pressure building deep down in his bowels. Had to be something he ate, he thought. Underdone rat on a stick, mebbe. Closing his eyes and gripping the rail in both hands, Okie tried to will the sensations away. He still had another couple of hours before he was relieved of the watch.

“TIME DILDO-LATOR! TIME DILDO-LATOR!” The seated droolies rocked their hips, scooting their behinds on the deck in time to the gleeful chant. “Time dildo-lator! Time dildo-lator!”

Daniel Desipio sat back and basked in their adoration. They couldn’t get enough of his backstories and technical explanations, although it was unclear if they understood a single word of the complex scientific and philosophical concepts that underlaid his narratives.

Still, the frenzied attention buoyed his spirits.

From the Yoko Maru’s bitt, Daniel surveyed the squalid little ville spread out below. Construction had started in the most weather-protected spot, in the lee of the freighter’s bow. The first cluster of single-story huts used the ship’s hull for their rear walls. Building materials had to be salvaged and ferried from the flooded ruins of Corpus, so subsequent structures shared both side and rear walls. Nothing in the ville was straight, not roofs, not doorways, not lanes, not side yards. Everything was made of accumulated scrap, unpainted or covered in peeling layers of paint. Over three decades the slapdash habitations had spread to the shore of the anchorage on the north side. The islanders had built monuments to themselves, expressing their personalities, desires, artistic senses with found materials, the restricted pallette of the rubbish heap. It could have been a village on the edge of a garbage dump in predark India or Brazil. Or a squatter camp in South Africa.

That said, the grounded container ship’s bounty had provided every ramshackle hut with its own Taiwanese knock-off Weber kettle and fancy barbecue tools, and its own plastic lawn furniture.

The Nuevo-Texicans were damn proud of their little corner of the world.

Daniel Desipio, twentieth-century freezie, had a different perspective: a shithole by any other name.

For what had to have been the thirtieth repetition in as many hours, the Fire Talker recited the story of how the Vikings acquired the time dilator, the desperate bargain they had made with the Martian hordes, and their combined exploitation of the ancient Norse Runestone Concatenation. That terrestrial-extraterrestrial plot had been frustrated by the intervention of the Iroquois Ninja princess—proud, statuesque, with raven hair and slanted black eyes, and spots of blushing rose in the centers of her buckskin-colored cheeks—and of her singing katana, and her coterie of cloud operatives that moved from one human mind to another like stops on a subway line.

As he mechanically regurgitated the pulp fiction series’ canon—something he could have done in his sleep—Daniel watched his audience for the initial, subtle signs of infection. A growing restlessness. A flushing of the face. A sensitivity to light. He visualized the viruses invading individual host cells, commandeering reproductive machinery, replicating until their sheer volume burst cell walls, then spewing forth in a torrent, hardwired to penetrate and infect new cells: an unstoppable, rising tide of the submicroscopic, leading to debilitation, agony and horrible death. All of which derived from the poison that lurked in his 137-year-old blood, and to which he was happily immune.

Whenever Daniel reflected on what had led him to his most peculiar fate, the answer was always the same: the blind pursuit of Art. It was what had animated and enthused him since the third grade when he started reading and collecting various pulp action series from second-hand bookstores. He had pored over the “Golden Age” titles until the yellowed, musty pages dropped from the bindings, absorbing the nuances of style and content. All Daniel Desipio had ever wanted to do was to write adventure books like those. Doggedly determined, he had eventually achieved his goal, but in the twenty years between his introduction to pulp and his first sale of a novel, the industry had changed. Series action fiction had become a franchise operation, produced by hamsterwheeling, faceless ghost writers; it was in effect a dead-end career.

Slaughter Realms, the house-owned pulp series he had slaved upon for seven years, had had several nameless authors and had run to well over 250 titles. All nagging questions of artistic control and continuity had been resolved by Armageddon, by more than a century of elapsed time, and by his unlikely survival.

Even before the nukecaust, individual books in the series had been forgotten, consigned to landfills and bonfires, and along with them Daniel’s contributions to the canon. He had come up with gemlike, signature exclamations for two of the main running characters, Ragnar the Viking and Nav Licim, the wilted but defiant patriarch of the celery people. In return for his devotion to his Art, Daniel Desipio received no author credit, an hourly wage well below the established national minimum and no royalties on book sales.

The turning point for him had come on March 13, 1998, when after finishing his twenty-ninth book in the series he had asked the publisher for a hundred-dollar raise and was denied. Crushed and mortified, for the first time Daniel actually considered abandoning his lifelong dream. He considered becoming a Realtor. If he had taken that career course, he would have certainly perished along with almost everyone else in the U.S. on that January day in 2001. But in a moment of pure inspiration, fueled by the depths of his outrage and despair, Daniel had decided to do something truly radical in the name of his craft, for the sake of fresh experience, of something truly unique and exciting to write about. Without a thought to the possible consequences—not that even he could have imagined them—he had thrown himself into the meat grinder of Science.

More than a century post-nukeday, the world’s values had taken a hard U-turn, and a turn for the better as far as he was concerned. The idea of bottom-rung fiction or bottom-rung consumer merchandise lost all meaning when there was nothing left for either to be compared to. Which is why the cargo of the Yoko Maru was worth fighting and dying for.

A self-guided sightseeing tour of the island’s shantytown had told Daniel what was stored in the container ship: white running shoes aplenty, wardrobes of summer fashion, circa 1999, and plastic lawn furniture. But also toothbrushes and toothpaste, toilet paper, linens, bathware and canned goods in profusion. Empty tins of pork and beans, peas, pearl onions, peaches, black olives and potted meat lay scorched in the camp middens, as well as cast-off plastic packaging from barbecue potato chips, honey-roasted peanuts, jerky sticks, cookies and candy bars. Daniel had seen bag charcoal, car batteries, spark plugs, fan belts, flatware, dishes, pots and pans, stuffed toys, cooking oil, and grooming and beauty products—bar soaps, lotions and lipsticks. There was also a variety of made-in-India, factory-loaded ammo: 9 mm Parabellum, 7.62 mm Russian and 12-gauge low-brass quail loads, among others. Apparently, the Yoko Maru held a large stockpile of predark centerfire munitions.

As he prattled away on automatic to his spellbound audience, Daniel took in the islanders’ highly organized defensive preparations, the lines of people moving on and off the ship, the self-sacking of the ville. They had a good plan. Obvious, but good. From the hard looks he was getting, they suspected him of something far more nefarious than rotting the minds of droolies—as if their suspicions mattered at this point. The fight for the island was already lost; the Nuevo-Texicans just didn’t know it…yet.

“Battle armor! Battle armor!” Daniel’s audience hollered, shattering his reverie. “Battle armor! Battle armor!”

He held up his hands for quiet. “All right, all right,” he conceded, “but this is absolutely the last time today…”

To the delight of his listeners, in highly numeric and acronymic detail Daniel went over the specifications of the Martian-made assault gear, down to the chemical composition of the metallic-plastic alloys, the thicknesses of individual body plates and the “theory” behind the nanotech circuitry they contained.