Dark Resurrection (21 page)

“Where are they taking us?” Mildred pressed.

“They call it Xibalba,” he answered after a pause. “Someplace even warmer.”

“To hell, you mean?”

“Pretty much.”

It was Jak’s turn to make a grab for the Fire Talker, and he moved in a white blur. The morning’s drugs seemed to be wearing off more quickly than usual, perhaps because they were all perspiring so heavily, sweating the dope right out of their systems. Despite a valiant effort, the albino youth came up well short at the end of his chains. This time the freezie bastard didn’t even flinch. He just sat there as calm as could be, his arms folded over his chest, grinning from ear to ear.

The companions rode on in stony silence. They had learned the hard way that they had to watch what they said in front of the net-draped backstabber.

Ahead, Mildred saw that brown water covered a long section of the lane. Dog-face and the other horsemen slowed down before they entered it. As the companions’ cart rolled onto the swampy section of roadway, the wheels began to shudder and the cart box shook so violently it felt like it was going to fly apart. When Mildred looked over the side, the bow wave created by the front wheels revealed the cause of the rough ride. The road metal was made of foot-wide tree trunk sections, no doubt tropical hardwoods impervious to rot. They had been pounded straight down into the mud, edge to edge. This to keep the horse carts from sinking in over the tops of their wheels.

They left the tree trunks and began climbing up a shallow grade. The sides of the road rose much faster than they did. Soon it was clear they were traveling in a man-made ditch. It
was more than fifty feet deep. A shallow ooze of water meandered down the middle of it. In rainy season, Mildred knew the flow along this route would have been a torrent. In places the side walls had caved in, top to bottom, from erosion, forcing the lane to wind back and forth around the mounds of toppled earth and rock.

“Where the fuck are we?” J.B. asked.

“We’re in what’s left of the old ship channel,” Mildred told him. “Believe it or not, this is the Atlantic entrance to the Panama Canal.”

“What canal?” J.B. said. “It’s practically nukin’ dry.”

“Remarkable!” Doc exclaimed as he took it in. “This project was under way when I was time-trawled, but the French were a far cry from finishing it.”

“They never did finish it,” Mildred told him. “They turned it over to the U.S. around 1900. Took another fifteen years to get it done.”

“When completed,” Doc said, “it was supposed to be one of the wonders of the modern world.”

“Not so wonderful,” Jak said. “Looks like nukin’ big shithole.”

After they’d gone farther, Doc said, “But where are the locks? There have to be locks.”

“My guess is they broke open, probably from earthquakes on nukeday,” Mildred said. “One after another, like dominoes falling. Then the force of the water released from the dammed-up lakes tore the gates right out of the bedrock, tore out all the shoring, too. Thirty years of sweat and sacrifice, gone in the blink of an eye.”

After what Mildred estimated was a three-mile journey, they exited the far end of the narrow channel. In front of
them the vista broadened, exposing a plain of destruction all the way to the western horizon. It was the former artificial lake bed.

This was a different sort of devastation, a vast table of low, scrub vegetation and bare rock, broken here and there by densely forested humps and hills—the high points in elevation that had been turned into islands when the river valley was flooded to form the lake. When the trillions of gallons of water had flowed out to sea, it had scraped the landscape clean, right down to the bedrock. The road in front of them was much wider and well traveled. It ran string-straight for a good mile, then it disappeared around a forested mound.

They descended onto the sweltering plain. Skeletons of one-hundred-foot-tall trees, two centuries dead, drowned when the land was inundated, were smothered in drooping tangles of strangler vines. The second growth scrub was no more than eight feet high, and packed into dense patches, presumably where some topsoil remained. Clouds of black flies buzzed over potholes filled with stagnant water. Wide swatches of wet mud, possibly quicksand, lay just off the rutted path. The convoy made slow but steady progress, heading toward the flanks of the low islands-hills.

When Mildred looked behind them, off to the right, she saw a vast wedge of smooth concrete embedded in the lake’s rim. The dam hadn’t burst, after all. That explained the extent of the damage to Colón. The full force of the flood had gone out the ship channel, through the city, into the bay, not the natural river channel well to the west.

Under the blazing sun, in the still air, the blistering heat and humidity, it was hard to breathe.

“It must be close to fifty miles to the Pacific side of this
ditch,” Mildred said to the Fire Talker, pointing over his shoulder to the west. “Are we going that far? Is it all going to be like this?”

The poseur didn’t answer her. He was pretending, and not very convincingly, that he was asleep.

Over and over, Mildred kept asking herself, What do these fuckers want with us? Why us? Why were we pulled out of the line in the fort? And the other survivors of Padre and the three weeks of rowing dragged off to ritual slaughter? It was High Pile who’d done it, she recalled. It had been his decision to spare their lives—for something. The bits of the puzzle were there, she could feel it, but she couldn’t quite piece them together.

Not yet, anyway.

If they were going to get out of this mess, Mildred knew they were all going to have to stop eating. She also knew it was possible that J.B., Doc and Jak would experience withdrawal symptoms—fever, itching, sweating, nervousness. Symptoms that would be difficult to hide. On the trail there would be no way to rinse off the drugs. They would have to ditch their food, somehow. And do it in front of Daniel without his catching on. That wasn’t going to be easy.

Looking at the sniveling bastard feigning sleep to avoid confrontation, she wished she’d had another yard of slack in her chain. Kicking in his head, even if it didn’t save their lives, would ultimately save the lives of innumerable others.

As they approached the first of the islands-hills, coming within perhaps two hundred yards of it, Nibor called a halt to advance. He and the other horsemen dismounted. Their cart driver locked the brake, then picked up the RPD.

For a split second, when he stood and turned the weapon toward them, Mildred’s heart sank. She thought, This is it.
They’ve taken us out to this waste ground to finish us off. That’s what the others thought, too; she could see it in their eyes.

Then her whitecoat’s logical brain kicked in. Driving all the way out here just to execute them seemed like a whole lot of trouble for nothing.

Her analysis proved correct.

The cart driver held the light machine gun braced against his hip, aimed not at the passengers, but at the scraggly line of scrub trees off to their left. Dog-face and the other three horsemen aimed their weapons toward the forested hill and points on either side.

Then they all cut loose at once, unleashing a thundering roar of overlapping autofire that echoed out over the flatland.

In the distance Mildred could see leaves and branches clipped off and dropped by the sprays of bullets, and puffs of dust where they struck and skipped off the bare ground; this in a broad half circle in front of them.

Five hundred rounds fired in forty-five seconds.

If there were hostiles out there lurking, if there were savage critters out there lying in wait, they either turned tail or fell flat on their bellies.

The warrior priests were sending a message. A don’t-fuck-with-us, we have ammo to burn.

Nibor and his men reloaded their RPDs with fresh drum magazines before the convoy moved on.

Commander Guillermo Casacampo lay in a stinking, moaning heap. The hiss of the Coleman lamp on the floor beside the mattress played counterpoint to the erratic slurp and slap of sweaty flesh as three of the hacienda’s sluts rendered intimate service.

The woman astride him had a determined, screwed-up, go-for-broke expression on her face as she merrily humped away. The other faces were busy, hidden behind the curves of her flipping hips, busy making lollypops of his testicles.

Casacampo was in hog heaven, lying back, smoking a fat, black cigar while getting seriously laid. Similar exertions earlier in the evening had caused his high-piled hair to fall loose and tumble down around his shoulders. The sluts were wearing borrowed golden trinkets, from his coiff’s treasure trove, on their brown wrists and around their slender necks. All three were shaved bare as babies between the legs; not like the whitecoat witches, he thought, who were woolly mammoths down there.

These sluts really knew how to screw. They performed half twists of the hips at just the right phase of the upstroke.

And their enthusiasm for the work was appreciated.

He puffed away on his stogie, head cradled on a forearm, watching his
verga
slippery slick, dipping in and out of suc
tioning, superheated heaven. He clenched the cigar between his teeth. Oh, that half twist! It had nailed him, again. The pirate’s hips jerked up from the mattress in a flurry of rapid, savage thrusts. The slut squealed and hung on to his chest for dear life, her legs flapping to the sides, her arms flapping to the sides, titties flapping every which way.

Glorious.

When his release faded, Casacampo sank back onto the sweaty sheets, taking the cigar out of his mouth so he could more easily gasp for breath. The slut disengaged herself and rolled onto her back beside him.

A chorus of rhythmic moans was coming from rooms down the hall. Moans punctuated by shrill cries that almost sounded like pain. But these Colón sluts weren’t hurting; just the opposite. His crew was hammering it, doing credit to the Matachìn name.

Then his head began to spin. It spun so fast he had to close his eyes and hang on to the edge of the bed. How much had he drunk, how much looney-weed had he smoked? How many times had these sweaty little bitches brought him to climax? For the life of him, he couldn’t remember.

A month of this kind of excess was the kind of R&R the doctor ordered, a just compensation for the dangers he’d faced, the valor he’d shown, for the victories he’d laid at the feet of the Lords of Death.

One of the other sluts picked up a jar from the floor, dipped a finger it to its contents, then started smearing the semiliquid stuff on his rapidly diminishing
verga.
The jungle concoction was cool at first, then warm, then warmer still. He felt a tickle deep in his pelvis as his manhood slowly but surely became hard yet again.

Music drifted in from down the hall. A happy, rhythmic tune. One of the sluts was playing a harmonica. No doubt about it, he thought, these Colón ladies were multitalented mistresses of the fuck. Not so much to look at from the neck up, as most of their teeth had cracked edges, like they’d been used to open beer bottles. But they didn’t giggle like idiots the whole time they were being banged, like some he could name.

Casacampo took a long pull on his cigar as the anointing slut hurriedly straddled his hips. As she leaned back, impaling herself on him, he gave her a resounding smack on the behind.

Giddyap.

Then the room’s door opened and slammed back.

Everyone on the mattress looked as a naked pirate staggered in, his eyes bugging out of his head.

At first Casacampo thought the sailor was just wild-ass drunk, then he saw that his throat had been cut from ear to ear. Blood sheeted over his bare chest and dripped down his legs onto the floor.

The wounded Matachìn fell to his knees, unable to speak, begging for help with those bulging eyes and bloody outstretched hands. A shadowy figure appeared in the doorway right behind him. A savage boot between the shoulder blades drove the dying man face-first into the floor.

Casacampo blinked in shock and the cigar dropped from his gaping mouth. In the glow of the lantern, he saw the straps of a headlamp, then the black eye patch. He saw the silencer-equipped submachine gun and the machete stained crimson from gut hook to hand guard.

Then a second man stepped alongside the first.

Another eye patch, only the opposite eye socket was covered.

Both of them were alive. Both of them had escaped execution.

The commander prayed that he was merely asleep, that it was a dream brought on by all the joy juice and the marijuana he’d consumed. But it was not. It was all too real. He threw the slut off him, threw her so hard she flew from the mattress and thudded in a heap to the floor.

“You’re not going to be needing that,” Chucho said with a smirk, pointing the fat shroud of a submachine gun silencer at his
verga.

“¡Whuh puta!”
Casacampo snarled, groping alongside the mattress for his other weapon.

Not a chance.

The blue-eyed Hero Twin put a boot sole on the barrel of the 9 mm subgun, pinning it to the floor as he raised the machete to strike. The sluts ducked their heads and scattered for the far corners of the room.

A stinging kick in the backside wrung a groan from the pirate commander.

“Get up, asshole,” Chucho ordered. “You’re coming with us.”

Surely there would be rescue, Casacampo thought. Surely his crew would mount a counterattack.

Chucho tied his wrists behind his back with a plastic cable tie, cinched it up so tight it nearly made him whimper.

The blue-eyed Twin then asked Chucho a question. Casacampo didn’t understand.

Chucho answered in kind, then he translated his reply into Spanish, “Fuck the bastard, let him go naked.”

“Come, my brown beauties,” Chucho said as he waved the
women to their feet, then ushered them out of the room like a mother hen. “These stinking murderers will never molest you again.”

Casacampo couldn’t help but bristle at that characterization. The “beauties” in question hadn’t objected in the least to being molested; in fact, they had insisted on repeated such impositions.

Barefoot, bare-assed, his tower of dreads—the symbol of his rank—deconstructed, the commander was unceremoniously booted through the doorway and into the second-story hall.

Someone will nip this effrontery in the bud, he assured himself. Two one-eyed men couldn’t have killed all my crew.

Chucho shoved him onward, toward the main staircase. He stumbled past the open doors of rooms lit by white gas lanterns. The other sluts had all fled. In every room his men lay naked, butchered like hogs on the mattresses or the floor, sprawled in spreading pools of their own blood. No one had gotten off a shot. No one had gotten off a shout.

It then occurred to him that the piercing cries he’d heard from down the corridor hadn’t been from sluts in climax, and weren’t cries of pleasure, but of surprise, pain and sudden death. The Hero Twins had made their way down the hall, room by room, to take him last of all. Drunk on joy juice, high on marijuana, in the midst of a marathon screw session, his pirates were not expecting that kind of trouble. Still, how could two men overcome ten times of their number and not raise an alarm?

It turned out that there was a third member of the team. Another gringo waited for them at the top of the stairs. He had long flowing mustaches and a big, stainless-steel revolver on
his hip. Like the others, he carried a silenced submachine gun and wore a headlamp, this over the crown of his billcap.

Casacampo offered up no empty threats as he was urged down the staircase by the Hero Twins’ boots. These scum could go fuck themselves before he’d say a word to them, he told himself as he was kicked off the bottom step. He was a Matachìn commander, after all. Born to fight and die. There would be hell to pay for this indignity.

To his right, the quarry tile floor was wet with blood. More pirates lay dead with their throats cut, their dreads soaking up the spilled gore like sponges. He could see the yawning second mouths under their chins, their necks had been sliced all the way to their spinal columns.

In his mind, Casacampo tried to keep track of the crew he’d lost so far, and those still left to put up a fight. By his count there were still at least eight at large, more than enough to chop down these running dogs.

Chucho and the blue eye hustled him out the double doors onto the covered patio. By the light of the guttering candelabrum, he saw more dead men, these killed by wire garrotes, their eyeballs bloodred, their faces black and bloated. Their tongues protruded as if they were giving final, obscene, black raspberries to the world.

Out in the courtyard there was yet another corpse, this one facedown, the back of its skull split open.

The intruders turned on their headlamps and the beams cut through the humid darkness. Obviously, they were confident that they had killed everyone inside the hacienda. The machine gunners on the rooftop were dead, too, Casacampo reasoned, or they would have opened fire by now. The commander realized that Chucho and his two friends had to have
recced the grounds before the assault; they knew how many Matachìn there were and where to find them.

Sixteen dead. He was down to three on his side.

Even odds.

When he was marched through the open stable doors, his hope evaporated. In the light of a lantern sitting on a hay bale, he saw three bodies hanging by their necks from the rafters. They dangled dead still, spines snapped, necks stretched to the splitting point.

If the Twins and the gringo had fired a single shot to bring any of them down, there was no evidence of it. The commander, despite his resolve to stay strong to the end, was taken aback. They had killed nineteen trained, battle-seasoned pirates and none of the victims had made a sound, or apparently put up a fight.

It was hard to shout a warning when your throat was cut so deep that your vocal cords were severed, or when a wire noose was squeezing off your air and the blood flow to your brain.

Casacampo had always considered Chucho’s reputation to be overblown, fabricated out of whole cloth to make the priests and red sashes seem less incompetent. For one man to do so much damage to them, and get away with it again and again, he had to be bigger than life, right? The commander was having second thoughts about that assessment now. What if all of it was true? True, and then some?

They made him stand in front of his hanged men, then the gringo with the mustache told him what they wanted.

“¿Cinco gringos, dondè esta?”

Bad accent, worse Spanish

Casacampo hawked and spit on the man’s boots.

Looking down at the splotch of nasty on his toe, the gringo
shook his head and clicked his tongue in disapproval. In more bad Spanish he informed the commander, “We’re going to give you to Chucho then.”

The renowned bandit and murderer had picked up a hand scythe from a hook on the stable wall. He slashed the crescent of pitted steel back and forth, testing its balance and reach.

Casacampo’s heart thudded up under his chin. He had faced death many times before, but never naked, never with his hands tied behind his back.

To make things much worse, Chucho was staring fixedly at his flaccid manhood as he whipped the scythe back and forth.

Defiance, pride, honor melted away—they were just words, after all. They were replaced by ungodly fear.

Casacampo felt a warm wetness in the straw under his bare feet, looked down and saw to his horror that he was pissing himself.