Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) (9 page)

“I answer to Tom, among other things,” he replied.

Then the man turned to Ryan, who was drying his feet prior to putting on his boots. “Before we head out, I’ve got to ask you something else,” he said. “No matter what you tell me, it won’t change anything that we’ve agreed on. After all, a deal’s a deal. I just want to know. Did you chill those bikers to get the booty?”

Before Ryan could reply, J.B. chimed in.

“We ain’t coldheart robbers,” the Armorer hissed through clenched teeth.

“And I’m supposed to know that from looking at you?” Tom countered, amused at the idea.

“The bikers were already chilled when we found them,” Mildred explained. “Stickies swarmed them.”

Tom frowned and shook his head. “Son of a bitch, that’s a triple nasty way to go.”

“We need to get a move on,” Ryan said. “Some of BoomT’s sec men could have survived the explosion. When they look around they’re not going to be real happy with the way things turned out.”

“My ship’s moored over that away,” Tom said, pointing due south, toward what a century ago had been the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, and what now was a narrow slip of a makeshift harbor.

There were five extra twenty-five-pound packs to lug. J.B. couldn’t carry anything but his M-4000, and he had stiffened up so much he needed Mildred’s help just to get to his feet. When she reached for her load of C-4, their new business partner brushed away her hand. “Don’t worry, I’ll take it,” Tom said. “You see to your friend there.”

The pack of plastique felt cool against Ryan’s back as its moisture soaked through his coat and shirt. They climbed out of the water hazard’s bowl and set off down the slope, onto the flatland, past the cultivated fields. Ryan took the rear guard, behind Mildred and J.B.

There was no longer any need to run. They walked at a brisk steady pace. Ryan kept looking over his shoulder to make sure they weren’t being followed.

The sound of the explosion had awakened the field hands from their midday snoozes. Ryan saw them standing outside their shanties, one hundred or more yards away, hands on hips or shielding their eyes from the sun, looking in the direction of the mall and the rising pillar of smoke.

Beyond the south end of the golf course, the companions stepped back onto the gridwork of ruined and deserted city streets.

Almost at once, a group of armed men appeared around a corner, running toward them from the direction of the Gulf.

“Easy now,” Ryan cautioned the others as hands moved for weapons. “They don’t know what’s happened. And we’re not going to tell them. Keep walking nice and slow, like we’re in no particular hurry.”

That wasn’t the case for the strangers. Ryan measured the opposition as they rapidly closed ground. A half dozen sec men carried Soviet-made assault rifles on shoulder slings and five crusty sailors had the butts of their sidearms hooked over their waistbands. There was shock on all their faces. They didn’t go for their blasters. They didn’t see the companions as a threat.

A sec man stepped up and addressed Tom, whom he obviously knew. “What the fuck?” the deeply tanned, bald-headed guy exclaimed, pointing behind them at the massive smoke cloud. The wrinkles in his forehead extended past the middle of his scalp.

“Damned if I know,” Harmonica Man replied. “We’d just left the emporium, heading for my ship when there was a giant explosion at our backs. Fuck-awful blast. Never seen the like. Don’t know what the hell BoomT had squirreled away, but I’m telling you it all went up in a single go. We were three-quarters of a mile away and it still nearly chilled us.”

“What about other survivors?” the sec man asked, dread creeping into his voice. “Wounded?”

“We didn’t see anybody,” Tom said. “Fires were burning red-hot and there was too much smoke. Don’t see how anyone could have lived through it, though.”

“We’ve got to find out for sure,” the sec man said. “Some of our crew might have made it. They might be hurt. Come back with us and help recce.”

“There’s no point,” Tom said, shaking his head. “There’s nothing up there but ashes. It’ll take three days for them to cool down enough so you can start sifting through them. I’m not sticking around for that. I’m leaving Port A ville on this tide, and you’ve seen the last of me.”

“Well, fuck you, then,” the bald sec man said, angrily waving his crew onward.

“I wish you luck,” Harmonica Man said to his back.

The companions watched the would-be rescuers hurry off. The sec men and sailors didn’t cut through golf course, but took the street route, which was faster.

“Well, that makes things a whole lot easier,” Tom said when they were out of earshot. “Those were BoomT’s harbor guards. They could have made things dicey. Now there’s nothing to stop us from sailing off into the sunset.”

Standing water started at the railroad tracks, which divided Port A ville roughly in two, lengthwise. They sloshed through ankle-deep black brine; there was no way around it. The rise in sea level had inundated Big Hill Reservoir and the associated holding ponds. Sabine Lake had become a new invagination of the Gulf of Mexico. At closer range, the oil refinery was even more of a decrepit shambles, cracking towers canted at odd angles, gangways ending in space, and it was surrounded by an iridescent marsh of spilled oil. The reek of sulfur was like a snapkick in the solar plexus. Ahead of them, beyond the swamped and decaying downtown, Ryan could see huge, engine-powered ships—rusting hulks of tugs and tankers—listing on their sides in the shallows. Violent storms had driven them up onto the city streets and left them wedged there.

“Best you all follow me from here on,” Tom said. “I know the route the mule carts take.” He led them through knee-high water to the concrete ramp where the carts were off-loaded and loaded. The top of the ramp was connected to a system of crude floating docks. Big blocks of oil-stained, closed cell plastic foam and sealed, empty fifty-five-gallon drums supporting scrap lumber planks lay side by side. The pathway floated alongside the drowned buildings, past the ruined ships, and then cut a straight line across the deep predark channel to the sailboats tied up at the bases of the cargo cranes.

The dock moved under their weight, bobbing, undulating like the body of a giant mutie snake. At the tail end of the line, the motion was the most extreme. Ryan had to concentrate on every step and anticipate the rolling rise and fall.

As they negotiated the final, unprotected stretch of the walkway, a bullet whined past Ryan’s head and slapped into the water in front of him on the right. The wake of the near-miss longblaster round brushed the side of his neck and a chill ran down his spine to the soles of his feet.

Seconds later came the bark of a rifle shot.

When BoomT pushed the little red firing switch, he was expecting a loud and satisfying result.

He wasn’t expecting cataclysm.

He wasn’t expecting to black out from the explosion’s pressure wave.

The entrepreneur came to after a split second of oblivion, his head reeling. He couldn’t tell there had been two explosions—they had come too close together and his ears had been instantly overloaded. Now it felt like wads of cotton had been rammed into them. Or like he was thirty feet under water. Momentarily the world was as silent as the grave.

Then his senses began to return, one by one.

He tasted blood on his lips; it was leaking out of his nostrils in a steady trickle. Because he had taken cover behind the overturned semitrailer, he couldn’t immediately see what had happened to his world. Even so, he realized that the blast was exponentially bigger than he had planned. It had not only ripped the steel sheathing from the top side of the trailer, leaving bare the skeleton of the frame, it had lifted and scooted the massive rig six feet across the sidewalk, which in turn pushed the golf cart with him on it.

The sec men hunkered around him looked stunned, too. They were bleeding from their noses and ears.

Though his mind was clearing, he couldn’t seem to make his limbs obey him. Before he could get the cart in gear a choking pall of dust and smoke swept over the trailer. There was a lot more of both than he had anticipated.

Only when still-joined sections of his emporium’s concrete-filled exterior wall began to rain down around them through the haze, screaming to earth like unexploded 250 pound bombs, did BoomT realize the extent to which something had gone wrong.

Those bombs crashed onto the ancient pavement, shattering it and themselves in sprays of shrapnel and showers of sparks. The impacts actually shook the ground.

Whether seeing an opportunity in the confusion and smoke to escape their bondage, or simply fleeing in panic, his four slaves chose that moment to put wings on their heels. They sprinted away from the semi-trailer and the parking lot, arms covering their heads as hunks of building continued to fall.

Imagine june bugs caught between concrete and the head of a ball-peen hammer.

In midstride, the indentured servants were driven face-first into the ground by man-made meteors. The weight, speed and mass of the projectiles blew out the sides of their rib cages, pulverized their skulls and sent aerosolized guts, brains and marrow flying in all directions.

In the next instant, a chunk of concrete block wall slammed into the trailer, crashing completely through it.

BoomT managed to get the golf cart in gear and moving. Cranking over the steering tiller, he bid the suddenly worthless cover adieu. Accelerator pedal floored, head lowered, he sped off, following the sidewalk south. His sec men ran after him.

Until he circled out of the choking dust plume, he had no idea what had happened, what he had in fact done. As he took in his former domain, he couldn’t recognize it.

It took a moment for the truth to sink in.

Sure enough, there was a crater big enough for a swimming pool.

That vacant hole, still belching smoke, was his entire net worth.

Everything BoomT had worked and fought for his whole life—his magnificent edifice to post-Apocalyptic commerce, its stock of previously owned merchandise, the contents of his treasure room, his devoted sec crew, his gaudy, his assemblage of willing if less than appetizing whores—was obliterated. In its place was more fire and more smoke than he had ever seen. Towering flames danced behind the shifting wall of dust. The vast, roiling smoke column had risen a thousand feet in the air and was still climbing.

Worst of all, the direct connection between the excavation of the swimming pool and his total ruination was impossible to ignore. BoomT had been hornswoggled into pushing the button that brought his empire to an end.

He’d been rogered in a way that Deathlands’ legends were made of.

Legends that never died.

That he knew just got bigger and bigger, over time.

“Look over there! Radblazes, somebody made it out alive!” one of the sec men shouted, gesturing toward the end of the south parking lot as he passed BoomT a pair of full-size binoculars.

The entrepreneur peered through the optics. Better than a mile away, a handful of people stood on the edge of the golf course, staring back at the destruction. Even at that distance, BoomT could make out what looked like a black eye patch on one of them; the red-haired slut and the sawed-off little turd in the fedora were much easier to see. There was no mistaking who it was.

Or who had engineered his demise.

“One-Eye,” he growled. Even as he spoke, Ryan and his crew turned tail and ran to get out from under the falling debris.

It was too late for BoomT’s sec men to bracket them with blasterfire.

And besides, the sec men had their own concerns about being struck by objects dropping out of the sky. The relatively lighter stuff had been thrown higher by the blast. It took a lot longer to reach apogee and reverse course. And all of a sudden it was raining down around them. Some of the junk was the size and weight of cast-iron pipe fittings; some of it was three feet long, pointy and sharp.

Before the entrepreneur could order a retreat, one of his crew was struck from above, and the force of the blow dropped the sec man instantly to his knees. The end of a length of rebar angled up from his left collarbone and the steel rod’s tip poked out through the middle of his right buttock. His innards were skewered crossways. Blood gushed from the dying man’s mouth as he tried to speak.

BoomT stomped the accelerator, cutting the tiller arm over hard, swerving away from the gurgling horror. With debris bouncing off the ground on either side of him, he made a beeline for a perpendicular street and rumbled up onto the sidewalk. When he was out of range, he stopped the cart and let his men catch up.

He knew where One-Eye was heading. In that direction there was only one place to go. Cawdor and crew were making for the ships tied up at the crane. A getaway by sea. BoomT realized he could still cut them off and keep them from escaping. If they didn’t die in the ensuing gun battle, if they were taken prisoner, he would have his revenge, and it would be mythic.

It would have to be to make up for his loss of face.

What Trader had done to him so many years ago had been bad, so bad that the story of his hosing still circulated, still tainted his reputation, but this was a defeat of an entirely different order of magnitude. This was a total wipe-out. An extermination.

But why?

BoomT racked his brain for an answer that made sense. There was no material gain for Cawdor that he could see. One-Eye hadn’t plundered the treasure room. If he’d tried, the guards posted there would have responded with bullets and a major firefight would have ensued. The fat man had come away holding the shitty end of the stick in his final deal with Trader, so there was no reason for One-Eye to risk his life and the lives of his crew to get payback. If there was payback due, it was BoomT’s to collect.

His mention of Trader’s death had been a test. He had held back critical details of the story, to try to find out what Cawdor knew. For years BoomT had been spreading rumors about being in the room with Trader in his last helpless moments, sometimes implying that he had hastened the legend’s departure with his own two butt cheeks. The tales were complete fabrications, of course; they were intended to restore his lost status and prestige. The fat man hated to be bested, and since Trader had disappeared without a trace, there was no one to question him on the facts.

Unfortunately there was no one to refute them, either. Which was something that hadn’t occurred to him until now.

It occurred to BoomT that he had been punished for the crime of running off his mouth.

And the punishment meted out was inconceivable.

Why were Cawdor and Pipsqueak hauling ass for the moored ships? That one was easy to answer—in case BoomT had somehow miraculously escaped.

His sec men joined him, coughing, sweat streaking the soot that covered their faces. The whites of their eyes were scoured pink from dust and ash. BoomT was down to five soldiers. Cawdor had six. An even match, except in firepower. His sec crew was armed with automatic weapons and extra mags.

“The scum who did this to us are headed for the water,” he told his troops. “No way are they getting away with this. We’re going to stop them from sailing out of here, no matter what it takes. Follow me.”

With a whir of the cart’s electric motor, BoomT accelerated away and his sec men fell in line behind. He kept his speed down, fearing his escort would either fall too far back to be of any use or faint dead away from exertion in the sweltering heat. His own massive, sweat-lubed buttocks were sliding around on the vinyl bench seat. Even though he was driving parallel to the golf course, he couldn’t see the opposition. That was a good thing. If he couldn’t see Cawdor, chances were Cawdor couldn’t see him.

BoomT already had a plan in place to stop an attempted escape by sea; a plan he had devised after the Trader deal gone bad. Because of the sunken tankers at the upper end of the Port A ville moorage, the only way in—from the south—was also the only way out for deep-keel vessels. That meant exit and entry could be blocked off in a matter of minutes, keeping robbers and cheats from reaching the open Gulf, and stopping would-be robbers from invading the moorage.

He was two-thirds of the way past the golf course when he saw a column of sec men running his way. He sped up to meet them.

The troopers were visibly relieved to find their boss still not-chilled.

BoomT was less sanguine about seeing their faces. His first question was addressed to the bald guy in charge of harbor security. “Why did you desert your posts?”

“To help with the rescue,” the sec man said. “We thought you’d need help to get out the wounded.”

“We’re all that’s left,” BoomT informed him. “There’s no one else to rescue. Everybody was blown to bits. The emporium is gone, too. Hell, the whole damn mall is gone.”

The sec men were struck mute by the news.

“Did you see a man with an eye patch?” BoomT demanded. “A stumpy little shit was with him, and a tall slut with red hair.”

“Yeah, we passed them on the way up,” the head sec man said. “Six strangers. And Captain Tom was with them.”

“They were the ones who did it, you droolies,” the fat man said. “They destroyed everything we had, and you let them go.”

Blood drained from the sec men’s faces.

They were thinking firing squad. And this time they were going to be the shootees instead of the shooters.

The sailors looked plenty worried, too. They backed away from the sec men, hands in plain sight and nowhere near their waistband-tucked blasters. Their body language said, This has nothing to do with us. Not our responsibility. It said volunteering for the rescue team was looking more and more like a mistake.

“We’ve got them outnumbered,” BoomT said, the collective pronoun taking summary execution off the table. “We can still stop them from escaping.” He turned to the sailors. “You guys are coming along, too.” Before they could protest, he added, “If you don’t help us win this fight, I’ll sail your boats out into the Gulf and scuttle ’em.”

With a wave of his hand, BoomT engaged the pursuit. The sixteen men followed behind him at a trot. Minutes later, when he first caught sight of their quarry, he hit the brakes and stopped the column. One-Eye and his crew were about five hundred yards ahead, just crossing the railroad tracks, starting to slog through the black water toward downtown. Picking up the binocs, the fat man counted seven, not six opponents. Captain Tom was indeed among them. In point of fact, the traitorous trader was heading the nukin’ parade. And not apparently at gunpoint. BoomT watched him lead Cawdor and Pipsqueak and the others up the ramp and onto the floating dock. When they disappeared between the half-submerged buildings, it was time to act.

“We’ve got to close on them before they get under way,” BoomT said. He pointed to his four quickest and strongest surviving lackeys. “You, you, you and you,” he said, “beat feet down to the skiff loaded with the harbor net, and string it across the entrance. Don’t engage the bastards. Don’t return fire. Just lay the barrier net and then find positions on the crane side to defend it. If we can seal them in, we’ve got them. We can take our own sweet time with the chilling.”

The quartet shoulder-slung their AKs and ran toward the water in the direction of the harbor mouth.

“The rest of you come with me,” BoomT said, then he flattened the accelerator pedal against the firewall.

When the heavily loaded golf cart bumped over the railroad tracks and splashed into the brackish water, BoomT once again hit the brakes. The vehicle had tiny wheels. If he went any farther the water level would rise to reach the motor and batteries, and short everything out. Cinching up his bedspread toga, the fat man unclipped an RPG from the canopy frame. It was the killshot. The ship sinker. It looked like a child’s toy in his huge hands.

BoomT slid off the seat into the warm, shallow water. He sloshed toward downtown at top speed, and his sec men and the sailors trailed in his foaming wake.

Grunting from the effort, the fat man waded knee-deep between redbrick buildings, then mounted the concrete ramp to the floating dock. “We’re going to lower the odds,” he told his men. He picked the two best shots from among the survivors. They only had iron sights on their AKs, but 30-round clips gave them plenty of wiggle room. “Get up on the rooftops,” he ordered the pair. “Hold your fire until they’re on the open stretch of dock. Then they’ve got nowhere to go except in the water. Take out as many as you can, pin down the rest. We’ll do the mop-up.”