Dark Resurrection (15 page)

The headlamp lit up the floor-to-ceiling iron wall and gate that divided the anteroom from the cell blocks. It lay in a twisted hulk, torn from its mounts in the stone, and wrenched off to one side.

It was eerily quiet as Tom walked on.

As though everyone inside had been struck dumb.

The concentrated stink that rose from the floor, walls and oppressively low ceiling was unreal. He had to stifle the urge to cover his nose.

The dimpled, sweating limestone wall on his left reflected greasily in the light of the headlamp. The rock had been polished and oiled by thousands upon thousands of palms sliding over it. Then he caught the sound of footsteps and whimpering, both of which were coming his way.

Out of the darkness beyond the forty-foot penetration of the Petzl’s beam, four red sashes staggered forward. As they stepped into the light, he saw their faces were covered in white dust. They held their arms outstretched like blind men, then shielded their eyes to block the painful glare.

They were all armed with double-barreled 12 gauges, even if the weapons were shoulder slung, even if they weren’t looking for a fight.

Sometimes fights just happened, ready or not.

Tom didn’t slow down. At point-blank range he shot them down like dogs, stitching 9 mm lead across their chests, sending them sprawling. The stutter of the silenced machine pistol was drowned out by the whine of through-and-throughs ricocheting off the walls and floor.

He walked past the twitching bodies, straining his eyes and his ears for some sign of Ryan and the others.

Huddled at the foot of the left-hand wall, he came across a pair of priests in red robes and tall, conical hats. They cowered there, kneeling in a shallow pool of some unidentifiable liquid; they appeared to be unarmed. They, too, were coated in rock dust. When the priests saw his light coming toward them, they started clapping their hands and mumbling something Tom couldn’t quite make out. But it sounded like they were thanking their godawful gods for rescuing them from the darkness.

Moving closer, he recognized the one thanking the loudest as the spider-bellied bastard who’d read the execution order for Ryan and his double.

If they weren’t part of the solution, they were part of the problem.

As he walked past, Tom shot them both once in the back of the head. Thwack. Thwack.

Priests in a puddle.

Problems solved.

A little farther on Tom came to a fork off the main corridor, a left-branching hallway. His headlamp beam swept over and into the first of a long bank of cramped cells. On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling bars, he saw a filthy, nearly naked human figure. The whites of the man’s eyes shone for an instant, radiating terror, before they squinted shut.

Two eyes shining back told him it wasn’t Ryan.

Tom looked into the next cell. There was a heap of rags on the floor. A bare foot with a grime-encrusted sole stuck out from under it.

“Ryan?” Tom said softly.

No answer.

No movement.

Farther down the dank hallway, beyond the range of the headlamp, and from deeper in the dungeon around him, the survivors were starting to stir, they were slowly coming to life. Tom had no idea how many prisoners were caged in the pitch-dark, but the noise they made was getting louder and louder. Shouts. Moans. Screams. Cries for help. Very soon, he realized, the din and the echoes of the din down the cavelike halls would make it impossible to hear himself think. He had to locate his targets and get them the hell out before things deteriorated even more.

Tom didn’t have time to go up and down the labyrinthine passages, searching for Ryan and the others cell by cell. He didn’t have a map of the interior. Getting lost was not an option.

Rather than shout Ryan’s name down the cell blocks as he walked the main passage, something that he knew would cer
tainly draw dozens if not hundreds of affirmative replies from the other prisoners hoping for rescue, he had a better idea.

A signal only Ryan would recognize.

Tom reached into his hip pocket and took out his harmonica. After wetting his lips, he began to play a loud and lively tune with his left hand while he held the H&K up and ready in his right. The bright, rhythmic notes echoed and reechoed, bouncing down the winding corridors.

“Time to start the dying…”

Fright Mask’s saliva-spraying declaration turned out to be prophetic, but not at all in the way he’d intended.

The noose hung suspended two feet above Ryan’s head as he knelt on the floor beside Chucho. The one-eyed warrior strained to hold himself in check as the red sash pole-bearer began to lower the garrote-on-a-stick. He knew that when the loop was snugged up around his neck, the ability to free himself from the ankle and wrist cuffs would become irrelevant. Ryan hated all forms of restraint with a newfound passion—he had been locked up in them night and day for more than three weeks. And he hated this particular brand of restraint the most of all. There was no doubt in his mind that the noose pole was another of the Matachìns’ inventions: it smacked of their brutal ingenuity. Strangulation at a distance of five feet was the perfect way to control prisoners who had nothing left to lose. Unconsciousness was just a cord-pull away.

As luck would have it in this case, a very distant cord-pull.

Before the red sash could drop the loop, the entire structure, from the bedrock-coral foundation up, was rocked by a tremendous explosion. The floor shuddered violently underfoot, limestone dust from the ceiling rained down on Ryan’s
head. The noose-bearers froze, poles extended, looking wide-eyed at each other instead of their quarry.

Then the lights went out.

Suddenly it was darker than dark. And the darkness was like a blow to the head. Like having the eyes plucked from their sockets, and the sockets then stuffed with wads of cotton wool. Perspective, proportion, proximity, all were gone, as was all sense of up and down.

It was so dark no one dared move.

No one except Ryan Cawdor.

Perhaps he had an advantage already being half-blinded. Perhaps his life in Deathlands had trained him to react by instinct, to seize opportunities at a moment’s notice. Eight feet away in the pitch-black, the cell door stood ajar. His enemies were caught flatfooted.

“Now,” he said softly to his look-alike.

Further explanation was unnecessary.

Ryan and Chucho snapped the threads that held their heavy wrist and ankle cuffs in place, but neither man tossed the manacles aside. Instead, they gripped them by the middle of their connecting chains—turning the restraints instantly into wicked, close range, offensive weapons.

In effect, battle axes or nunchakus.

Great minds thought alike.

Shifting his brace of chain link and heavy steel bands to his left hand, Ryan found and grabbed hold of his double’s wrist. Again, no explanation was necessary; it was a necessity that had instantly occurred to them both. Chucho in turn locked his fingers around Ryan’s wrist. Not just twins anymore, but conjoined twins. Thus connected, they couldn’t lose each other in the dark, and they wouldn’t hit each other by accident.

As one, the two men rose from their knees, windmilling their manacles as they rushed forward, toward the open cell door. Ryan’s cuffs immediately thunked into something.

The something squealed like a stuck pig as it fell back.

He laid a second blow on top of the first, putting his entire body behind it, as though he was trying to drive in a spike with a sledgehammer. On his right, Chucho was doing the same to his own noose-bearer, only with a much more spectacular effect. Hot blood, presumably from a head wound, sprayed over the side of Ryan’s face and neck as the other pole-man collapsed under a rain of whistling blows.

In his mind, Ryan had locked in the last-known position of Fright Mask relative to the cell’s exit. In two quick strides his left shoulder was brushing against the edge of the iron doorjamb. He pulled Chucho through the doorway and out into the corridor.

“¡Fuego! ¡Fuego!”
the governor-general howled.

His red sash scattergunners didn’t pause to consider that there were friendlies in the line of fire. That’s how afraid of Chucho they were. They cut loose blindly into the blackness, shooting their weapons from the hip. Double muzzle-flashes lit up the inside of the cell. In the narrow, cavelike, enclosed space the flurry of 12-gauge reports was deafening.

It was spitting-distance target practice without a target.

Stray buckshot ricocheted off the back wall and whined down the hallway.

Ears ringing, the acrid smell and taste of burned gunpowder filling his nose and mouth, Ryan turned in Fright Mask’s direction. As he did so, he ran headlong into a red sash on his left. Rocking back on his heels, Ryan swung the manacle nunchakus, clobbering the man out of the way. The red sash’s shotgun clattered as it hit the floor.

“¡Otra vez! ¡Otra vez! ¡Fuego!”

Ryan caught something new in the governor-general’s voice: it was the shrill edge of panic.

But al Modo hadn’t taken into account the trouble his red sashes would have reloading their weapons in absolute darkness, this while retreating under toe-to-toe attack. As they fumbled to break open the actions of their double barrels, as they fumbled in their pockets for more shells, they lost their bearings. And in the suffocating, all-encompassing blackness, once lost, bearings could never be found. The corridor echoed with their whimpers and frantic curses.

Meanwhile, with Chucho in tow, Ryan had zeroed in on the sound of the governor-general’s voice. Fright Mask was very close. Shifting the brace of chains to his right hand, Ryan lunged forward with his left, fingers outstretched, searching for a grip on a soft, vulnerable throat. Instead, they closed on a handful of piled dreadlocks. Before he could jerk down and drive the general to his knees, the matted coils of hair slipped out of his grasp like so much greased rope.

As al Modo backed away into the nothingness, he yelled for help.

The governor-general was in no mood to stand and fight, but he had no choice. Help was not coming soon enough.

Ryan heard the sound of steel on steel: al Modo had drawn his ceremonial saber. Then came the hiss as it sliced back and forth in the pitch-black. The breeze it made brushed his face.

Forehand.

Backhand.

He felt Chucho squeeze his wrist hard, a warning. As the next backhand slashed, Ryan’s look-alike struck with his
nunchaku, catching the stroke at its weakest point, its terminus. Cuffs and chain screeched across the long blade.

Fright Mask growled as he tried to free his saber from the temporary trap.

But by then Ryan had gathered himself a handful of golden epaulette. He drove his shoulder into the center of the general’s chest, firing upward through his legs from the balls of his feet, throwing his entire weight into the strike. It caught Fright Mask off balance and lifted him clear of the ground.

To Ryan’s surprise, their dual trajectory ended abruptly, and much, much sooner than he’d expected. They both slammed into something solid. The impact with the corridor wall sandwiched the breath out of al Modo and he dropped. Ryan felt a stab of pain in his neck, and momentarily saw stars as he, too, slumped to the floor.

“Let go of my wrist,” Ryan told Chucho, who had been dragged to his knees behind them.

Reaching around the front of Fright Mask’s neck, Ryan grabbed the free end of the manacle chain he held, then he pulled it up past the exposed throat, over the hideous face. He couldn’t see what he was doing, but he could hear and feel the chain links scraping against the golden fangs. Ryan jerked back hard, yanking the manacles into the corners of the governor-general’s mouth like a horse’s bridle. Jamming a knee in the middle of the man’s spine, he leaned back, applying pressure to the jaw hinges.

“Nuh! Nuh!” al Modo whined, shaking his head, twisting his torso, trying to claw backward to reach Ryan’s surviving eye.

“Are you choking him to death?” Chucho asked with obvious delight. “I wish I could see…”

“Choking is too good for him,” Ryan answered. At that
moment he was thinking about revenge. He was thinking about the Padre Islander boy, Garwood Reed, about how he had died. “This is for the boy he had butchered on the church steps,” Ryan said. “Tell the piece of shit that.”

Chucho translated.

And as his double spoke the words, as the words sank in, Fright Mask went wild in Ryan’s grasp, flailing his arms and kicking out with his legs in a last-ditch attempt to free himself.

Ryan twisted the chain into a knot behind the governor-general’s head. With the links holding down his tongue, Fright Mask couldn’t cry out. They didn’t stop him from slobbering, though. When Ryan felt that cold, stinking slime smear across the back of his hand, it was his turn to go crazy. He started ramming the man’s face into the limestone wall. The sculpted nose broke on the first impact, then the golden fangs, then the rest of his front teeth, then both his jaws.

But it wasn’t enough.

As Doc Tanner had said, there was hell to pay.

“For Garwood,” Ryan snarled. “For Garwood Reed…” Grunting from the effort, the one-eyed man slammed the governor-general’s disfigured head against unyielding rock again and again, until the skull finally shattered and flew to pieces. Blood and brains splattered across Ryan’s face and forearms.

In disgust, Ryan hurled down the rag-doll corpse. As he pushed back from it, his hand brushed the saber al Modo had dropped.

“Here, Chucho, take his blade,” he said, rising to his feet. He groped a hand in the dark, trying to find the shoulder of his look-alike.

Before he made contact, a second explosion shook the
darkness, this one much closer, much more devastating. The initial shock wave dropped Ryan hard to his knees. In the same instant it wrung an agonized groan from the corridor’s stone ceiling; with a resounding crack it started to cave in.

A blast of rock dust swept over him. He heard terrible screams. Then something hit him in the head and he passed out.

Gasping for air, he came to. For a moment he was disoriented. It was black as the pit of hell. He knew he’d hadn’t been unconscious long because the air was still thick with dust. He tried to move his legs and couldn’t; something heavy had fallen across them just above the knees. He reached down and felt the slab of limestone that held him pinned. He tried to move the rock, but it wouldn’t budge. The saber had fallen somewhere in the dark, so he couldn’t use it to get leverage.

“Chucho?” he called, choking on the dust when he drew breath. “Chucho, are you okay?”

There was no answer.

“Chucho!”

No answer.

Ryan felt a slight breeze across his cheek. A steady breeze. Which could only mean an exit to the outside had been opened—either the main door, or a breach in the perimeter wall caused by the explosion. He wasn’t the only one who felt the wind and understood what it meant. He could hear red sash and priest survivors stumbling around, turning face-first into the breeze, following it to find the way out. The sounds of their bootsteps grew fainter and fainter.

A couple of minutes later a flurry of bullets whined down the corridor. There were no gunshot reports. Just bullet flights, zinging and skipping off the stone walls. Someone was firing
a silenced automatic weapon. What that meant Ryan had no clue. But he guessed it probably wasn’t good.

As he tried to free himself again, and again failed, he heard strains of music coming toward him out of the dark. He recognized the instrument and the tune at once; and from the instrument and the tune, the musician. A wide smile spread across his face. He cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted as loud as he could, “Tom! Tom! This way!”

A tiny glow appeared in the center of the all-encompassing blackness; it seemed to be a long ways off, but Ryan knew the distance could have been an illusion in the absence of landmarks. The dim light approached, bobbing up and down. It was so faint it didn’t illuminate the sides or ceiling of the corridor. That was because of all the dust in the air. As it got closer, a tightly focused beam grew brighter. It speared through the dark, spotlighting a half-naked man sitting on the rock-and-body littered floor about thirty feet away from where Ryan lay trapped.

“Ryan?” said a familiar voice.

“Wrong twin, Tom,” Ryan said. “That’s Chucho. I’m over here. Can’t move my legs out from under this rock.”

The light turned and pinpointed him. He shielded his good eye from the glare with a hand. The light turned back to Chucho.

On the other side of the hallway, the double quickly rose to his feet, his manacle nunchakus cocked back. “You know this man?” he asked Ryan.

“Hell, yes, he knows me,” Tom said, playing the spotlight’s circle over the unmoving human forms half hidden by limestone cave-ins. “I’ve come to break both of you out of this shit pit. Help me get the rock off him so I can finish the job.”

Together the three of them shifted the slab. As Ryan tested his legs for injuries, Tom set his duffel bag on the floor. From it he took two headlamps, which he gave to Ryan and Chucho. As they adjusted the straps, he dug out a pair of beat-up, Argentine knock-off .45-caliber blasters.

In the light of his headlamp, Ryan checked his pistol’s mag and then eased back the slide until he saw brass to make sure a live round was chambered.

“Now let’s go surprise the others,” Tom said to Ryan. “Can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when I waltz up, big as life.”