Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) (25 page)

Daniel groaned when the pirates hoisted him up by the armpits. He had been hoping for a few more hours, even a day or two of freedom above deck. There was no reason for him to be thrown into the hold so soon. They were offshore and would remain offshore for the entire voyage back home. Casacampo didn’t question orders; he followed them, to the letter. By order of the Lords of Death and Atapul X,
enanos
were to be kept in solitary confinement en route to their missions and after their missions were completed. It was supposed to be a safeguard, to keep the plague from spreading to the crew and slaves, and to other unintended targets. The dengue weapon had no antidote. Once it was released in a population, there was no stopping it. It burned through lives like wildfire. If it wasn’t used with great caution, it could destroy everything the Lords had built.

Still, and this was what stuck in Daniel’s craw, everyone knew that mosquitos didn’t fly miles out to sea.

And mosquitos were the only way the plague was spread.

The pirates dumped him through the open hatch, into a chamber just big enough for one person. When the hatch slammed down, he knew to duck his head. He was plunged in darkness. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust. The cell had a vent at the back, near the ceiling, about six inches high by a foot long. It was covered with a fine mesh screen to keep mosquitos out. The vent let in a little light and a little fresh air. If he pressed his cheek against the inside of the hatch and twisted his head just right, he could look out at the boat wake.

He didn’t feel much like twisting his head at that moment. His neck still ached, and he could almost feel the chain the islander boy had tried to choke him with.

The narrow chamber was furnished with a fiber mat on the floor for sleeping, a plastic water jug, and a covered bucket for excrement and urine.

Cozy was not the word for it.

Daniel shuddered to think how much of his life since his resurrection had been spent in a foul stifling cage just like this.

They only let him out to spread the plague.

And there was no telling when that would happen again.

Daniel slumped to the mat and hung his head in his hands. He knew what the redhead thought of him. What Eye Patch and the others thought of him. But he didn’t consider himself evil at heart. The Matachìn, now they were evil. They had a choice in their behavior. They were volunteers in the service of the Lords. They signed on to commit excesses in the name of a greater authority. The Lords, they were even more evil. As in the Mayan myths, they commanded human suffering, sickness and death on a colossal scale. And they reveled in their power, always seeking to expand their territory. If anything, Daniel considered himself a victim of circumstance and his own naïveté.

Was there ever a pat on the head and a “Good job, Daniel?”

Nope.

Was there ever a reward for his diligent service?

Nope again.

His only reward was occasionally being let loose on the world. That was also his punishment. His freedom meant other people’s horrible deathes, which he had to watch over and over again.

He couldn’t understand why the carriers were always kept apart. They couldn’t infect one another. And they could provide each other with companionship, a sense of shared humanity. That might have made the condition more bearable.

In a self-pitying mood, he fell back on a familiar replay: how it had all come down to this. He recalled the day of his arrival on Devil’s Island in a kaleidoscope of image and sensation. The heat. The jungle. The screaming of the howler monkeys. Crocs. Wild dogs. Snakes. The overgrown concrete prison. Moldy outside, inside spotless. He flashed back to a spartanly furnished, white-painted cell. To the experiments. All very clinical. Sterile. Injections of serum by little brown nurses in starched white uniforms.

In the preliminary interviews back in the States, no one had said anything about mosquitos.

Or bioweapons.

They hadn’t mentioned it was a military research program.

He had gotten sick the first week. All the test subjects had gotten sick. He was one of the few who recovered, and the recovery had taken months. Only then did the scientists of Project Persephone tell him what they’d done to him. After it was too late. They told him they had created a weapon they couldn’t control. Morpholinos, anti-sense oligos, the entire genetic engineering bag of tricks, had no effect on the carriers. What had been done to their blood could not be undone. By way of an apology the scientists had offered him an alternative to termination or permanent resident status on Devil’s Island.

Daniel shuddered as he remembered the thawing, his waking up in a stainless-steel coffin. He remembered his first agonizing, lung-ripping inhalation.

When he came out of cryostasis, still on the island, he learned that the offspring of the prisoners had renamed that awful place Xibalba.

The Mayan word for hell.

Once again alone in the narrow dark with his recycling thoughts, alone for God knew how long, Daniel Desipio began to softly weep.

Ryan pulled back on the oar, studying the pirates as they argued among themselves on the stern. They were moving the five pairs of combatants around, setting the order of the upcoming fights to the death. When the order was finalized, it appeared that J.B.’s match was scheduled for last.

At the end of the line of fighters, the Armorer leaned against the stern rail, arms folded over his rib cage.

Mildred was beside herself. “J.B. can’t fight,” she said to Ryan. “Not with those ribs. Look at how big the other guy is.”

“Mebbe he can protect them,” Cawdor said. He didn’t know what else to say. He was plenty worried, too.

“The other guy saw his chest,” Mildred “He saw J.B.’s ribs when the dreadmaster lifted up his shirt. He knows where the bull’s-eye is.”

“J.B. will think of something. He always does.” Ryan sounded more confident than he felt. How he felt was pretty goddamn awful. He had been reduced to a spectator. He couldn’t help his oldest friend fight for his life and he couldn’t slip him a weapon that would tip the odds in his favor. All he could do was watch.

As the coxswain pounded out the tempo for the rowers, the pirates unmanacled the first two fighters and shoved them together in the middle of the stern deck.

The two scrawny men were evenly matched in size and reserves of strength. They both knew exactly what was at stake. They threw themselves at each other like wildcats. The strategy was obvious. They were trying to seize the advantage before their energy gave out. Punches, kicks, claw hands came in frantic flurries as the men stood toe-to-toe. There was no defense, just offense.

The pirates ringing the stern rails whooped and hollered, cheering for whichever man they had bet on.

Blood drops spattered the deck as the two barefoot fighters clenched and grappled. It didn’t take long for them to begin to wear down. After two minutes the punch fest became a hug fest as they hung on to each other for support, trying to regather their strength. Their body blows lost power and came in single punches instead of combinations, and at less frequent intervals.

Gasping for breath, neither could gain advantage.

The pirates’ cheers turned to boos.

It looked like the stalemate was going to continue, a round-and-round, slow shuffle dance, when one of the men suddenly collapsed to his knees. He was unable to get up, unable to stop the other guy from swinging around behind him, wrapping both hands around his neck and squeezing.

The kneeling man was too weak to fend him off. He couldn’t pry the fingers off his throat.

It was just a matter of time.

The squeezer kept up the pressure until his opponent went limp, then he let the body drop to the deck. The other guy wasn’t dead, Ryan could see him breathing. He was just choked out and unconscious.

The victor stood over the prostrate loser, hands on hips, breathing hard.

One of the pirates handed him a machete. It had a wicked gut hook at its tip and the main edge looked razor-sharp.

“Good grief!” Mildred moaned.

What happened next wasn’t clean and it wasn’t pretty. It was a hack job, start to finish. Death, when it came to the fallen man, came as a result of forty shallow chops, instead of one. The rain of blows sprayed blood in a wide fan across the deck and over the stern gunwhale. This drew cheers from the pirates. At least the guy remained unconscious throughout. When the deed was done, the machete was taken away from the man. As he was dragged to an empty place under the awning and chained to an oar, winning and losing bets were paid off.

No one bothered to wash off the deck before the next set of fighters was thrown together: a skinny man and a large woman, both naked to the waist and streaked with sweat and dirt.

“I can’t watch this,” Mildred said, turning her head away, looking out at the Gulf, as she continued to row in time to the drumbeat.

Ryan wouldn’t permit himself to look away from the spectacle. He was hoping to find some kind of strategy that would work for J.B., some plan, some trick he could yell out to him.

There was a lot of punching and kicking between the mixed sex fighters. At one point the man had the upper hand after straight punching his opponent in the face and buckling her knees. But he couldn’t close the deal.

The woman, who outweighed him by forty pounds, shot a snapkick to his solar plexus that made her heavy breasts fly almost up to her chin. The heart kick dropped the guy like a sack of rocks, an event that drew cheers from the audience.

The woman did a better job with the machete.

Five strokes instead of forty.

As the pirates dumped the man’s corpse over the side, Mildred turned back to Ryan and said, “They’re killing each other so they can take a few more breaths of air, so their hearts can beat another thousand times. Look at them. They’re all goners.”

Based on that assessment, J.B. was a goner, too, but Ryan chose not to point it out. Even if J.B. survived the coming fight, afterward he was going to have to pick up an oar and row, something that his broken ribs would make very difficult. If he couldn’t row, he was going to be flogged. A lot. Which would make it even harder to row. There wasn’t much wiggle room in the situation.

Two grizzled old men were pushed into the makeshift ring next. Both looked to be on their last legs. They were starved to skeletons. Their skin was peeling off in big white patches, revealing bright pink flesh beneath. Neither one had the eye of the tiger. After some slow circling and a few soft overhand blows, one of the men clutched the center of his chest and dropped to the deck.

“For nuke’s sake, look!” Ryan told the doctor.

“Coronary,” Mildred said, diagnosing from afar.

The white-haired victor didn’t have the strength to swing the machete. He tried several times, but he could only deal out superficial, shallow cuts. At each blow the loser, who was still conscious, let out a shriek of pain.

Finally, a burly pirate seized back the machete. With a single, downward chop he split open the stricken man’s skull from crown to the bridge of his nose. He then put his boot on the man’s neck and levered the blade back and forth to free it.

The lucky winner barely made it to the port rail without falling himself.

There were boos and catcalls from the pirates. They didn’t like the performance. The chilling hadn’t been done by the winner. There were disputes over whether bets should be paid off or not.

From the pilothouse deck overlooking the stern came a brusque command.

“What did he say?” Ryan asked Mildred.

“I’m not absolutely sure,” she said, “but I think the dreadmaster just changed the rules of the contest.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“The winner’s too weak to be of use.”

In short order the victor received the same treatment as the loser, a machete blade to the skull from behind. Then both of the bodies were pitched overboard. They bobbed together in the tug’s wake.

So far, Ryan hadn’t picked up anything J.B. could use. Each contest had been defined by the physical limits of the opponents.

The fourth match was only slightly more exciting than the third. The two men were decades younger, with deeper natural reserves of strength and more powerful wills to survive. They had, however, been galley slaves for a while, long enough to be used up and thrown away. They both managed to draw blood from punches to their mouths and noses before their arms hung down limp and useless by their sides.

When the spectators got restless, the Matachìn commander spiced things up by ordering a machete be slid across the deck between them.

The blade stopped at their feet. Both men dropped down on their hands and knees and began struggling for control of the weapon.

This set the pirates to hooting again.

Somehow, in the subsequent pulling back and forth, and the rolling around on the deck, one man ended up flat on his back and the other on top, straddling him. They each had hold of the big knife’s handle. The man on top was trying to bring the long edge across the front of his opponent’s throat. The man on the bottom was trying to drive the gut hook into his counterpart’s neck.

It was another stalemate, but not for long.

Gradually, using the deadweight of his body more than main strength, the man on top wore down the other guy’s strength. The blade came closer and closer, and then it bit into his unprotected throat. The man on top pressed down harder, making blood well up around the edge of the blade. Then, with a savage flourish, Top Man whipped the machete crosswise, cutting the man’s neck wide open. Blood gushed out onto the deck. The vanquished let out a howl of defeat, his heels drumming. In a few seconds, it was over.

The loser went over the side.

Bets were paid off.

It was J.B.’s turn next.

“You’ve got to watch this,” Ryan told Mildred. “We might be his only chance. We might be able to help him.”

“Help him!” Mildred exclaimed. “He can’t punch. He can’t breathe deeply, so he won’t have any stamina, and the other guy is eight inches taller. Ryan, I’ll watch, but all we can do for him is
pray.
”

The last pair of fighters was shoved together on the stern. J.B. looked extra-small compared to the guy he was pitted against.

“He’s left his glasses and hat on,” Mildred said. “Maybe he knows something we don’t.”

Ryan didn’t respond. It had also occurred to him that J.B. wanted to die wearing his hat and glasses.

The other guy had much longer arms. J.B. kept moving, circling around and around, avoiding the lunges, looking for a way under the man’s guard.

J.B. feinted left, when the man reached out, he booted him in the right kneecap. The impact of bootsole on cartilage made a crunching sound. From the expression on the man’s face, it had to have hurt, too. It slowed the guy down, big time.

Sensing he’d lost something important, the next time J.B.’s opponent lunged, he really extended himself. He managed to catch the Armorer by the collar, not the neck as he’d probably intended. Before J.B. could twist out of his grasp, the bigger man body-punched him, laying several quick, hard blows one on top of the other.

For a second all the blood drained out of J.B.’s face.

“Oh, no,” Mildred moaned. “No…” J.B. brought the edge of his boot heel down on the tips of the man’s bare toes, which wrung a piercing scream from his mouth. The guy let go and J.B. moved to the right, favoring his injured side.

Then Ryan noticed something about the way the other guy moved. His back was rigid, stiff, like it was locked in place. He didn’t twist his torso as he lunged for J.B. He lunged straight ahead. His only plan of attack was to get hold of his adversary and not let go.

A bad back was an occupational hazard for a galley slave. It meant early retirement and a spot in the kill-or-be-killed show.

If the guy couldn’t turn at the waist, he couldn’t defend himself from a side attack. And if he couldn’t do that, he was in deep shit.

“J.B.!” Ryan called. “Flank!”

The Armorer didn’t look over to acknowledge that he had heard and understood, he didn’t take his eyes off his opponent, but he immediately reversed course, then reversed again.

Ryan smiled for the first time in what seemed like hours.

“Why are you grinning?” Mildred said. “What is there to grin at?”

“J.B.’s checking the guy’s range of motion,” he told Mildred. “Seeing which side is the least flexible.”

“And how is that—” J.B. showed her how. He faked the big guy into moving toward his stronger side, then before his opponent could pivot back, J.B. stepped forward and heel-kicked him behind the same kneecap he’d kicked before.

With a loud crack, the leg gave way under him, and the man crashed to his back on the deck. He clutched his busted knee and wailed.

Holding his ribs with the insides of his forearms, J.B. didn’t waste the advantage. He laid into the guy with a series of snapkicks to the ribs and the side of his head.

J.B. didn’t kick in the guy’s head with his steel-toed boots, maybe because he didn’t want to, maybe because he was winded and didn’t have the strength.

As he moved back, his opponent rolled onto his stomach, then pushed up on his hands and knees. His head hung down. Blood dripped in a steady stream from his face, splattering on the deck in front of him.

It was game over.

But there was one more thing that had to be done.

One more awful thing.

The Matachìn were clamoring for it.

One of the pirates handed J.B. a machete. He accepted the weapon, but the expression that passed over his face was disgust.

If he didn’t chop the chop, Ryan knew the chances were good he’d get chopped himself, like the geezer who couldn’t make the chill.

J.B. stepped within striking range of his opponent’s exposed neck. The man looked up at him with horror and desperation. He didn’t want to die like a chicken. He wanted to die like a man.

J.B. gave him a little nod, an almost imperceptible nod toward the stern rail. Ryan caught it, but no one else did. The Armorer raised the machete skyward, then paused as if to summon his strength. The hesitation was on purpose. It gave the doomed man the chance to scramble to his feet and dive headfirst over the side.