James Axler - Dark Resurrection

More pain and suffering awaited him because his lifeblood was still valuable to his masters; or to be more specific, the marrow in his bones was valuable. Daniel was the only plague vector who’d survived the Deathlands adventure. All the other fire talkers, gaudy sluts and traveling tinkers had perished, either at the hands of the enemy or thanks to an overabundance of friendly fire. Without enanos, their infected ones, the Lords of Death couldn’t maintain their stranglehold on the Central American city-states. For their part, the Matachìn didn’t care how many of the enanos died, or how it happened. The only accounting of casualties came from Commander Casacampo, and he could make up any story that suited him.

A very long time ago, while Tooby was still an ice cube with hair, the Lords of Death were just a band of Matachìn, themselves—simple, brutal seafaring pirates. They had elevated themselves to godhood by being the first to control the plague and then apply it to the battlefield.

There was a roar at Daniel’s back; the tug’s diesels were starting up. He felt a lurch of movement as the tug turned away from the pier.

The next leg of his long journey about to begin.

The journey back to hell.

At blasterpoint, Ryan crossed the footbridge and passed through the iron gate, which opened onto a narrow, dank, stone corridor. The passage was lit by a string of bare, dim bulbs draped along the ridge of the ceiling. Ryan guessed the walls were at least five or six feet thick—thick enough to stop a sixteenth-century cannonball.

From behind came the clanks of chains and the sounds of boots scraping on the limestone floor; the other slaves were being hurried along by the Matachìn.

When Ryan, High Pile and their escort exited the corridor’s far end, they stepped out into the corner of a huge courtyard. Harsh light from the battlements illuminated the long colonnades on either side. On the left, the structure was faced with red brick; on the right it was naked limestone. Through the room-size arches on that side, Ryan could see the exterior wall and the gated entrance to the fort’s dock. The three masts of a large sailing ship were visible above it. Stretching out before them was a grassy sward. A two-story building blocked the far end, its rows of tall windows overlooking the courtyard.

Immense, sculpted stone heads of the various Atapuls guarded the colonnades’ entrances, ten heads to a side, glaring across the sward at one another. As Ryan walked on, he saw evidence of other recent human sacrifices. Fist-size gobbets of blackening flesh lay on the ground at the base of each of the idols.

Excised hearts. Twenty of them in all.

Along the left-hand wall were the rest of the remains, torsos in one heap, heads in another.

It smelled like a charnel house, and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the death stench inside the compound.

A group of eight men awaited them in front of the building at the end of the courtyard. Seven were robed and head-dressed priests, led by none other than the hairless spider himself. Ryan glanced up at the battlements on either side, three stories above. They were lined with red sashes. Close to three hundred of the sec men, he reckoned. All armed. All looked down at the spectacle.

The pirate commander advanced the last twenty feet by himself. Ignoring the priests, he knelt in front of the eighth man, who apparently outranked them all.

At first Ryan thought the guy was wearing an elaborate mask over his face, then he realized it was his face.

The one-eyed warrior had seen plenty of disfigurements in Deathlands. Some were accidental; some were battle scars like his own; some were hard punishment meted out for crimes; some were purely decorative. This one was in a league of its own.

A living fright mask.

The corners of the man’s mouth had been surgically extended deep into his cheeks, and the lips excised top and bottom, this to reveal inch-and-a-half-long fangs of gold where his canine teeth had once been. It gave him a permanent, awful, stylized grin, like the Atapul heads. Evenly spaced welts of purple, scarified tissue bridged his nose and cheeks, making them look corrugated, like a boar’s snout. Unlike the Atapul representations, his tongue wasn’t pointed or a foot long. His high-piled dreads were caged in a ceremonial headdress. The breastplate of his gilded battle armor was spattered with drops of fresh blood.

At a hand signal from the pirate captain, the Matachìn pushed Ryan forward, then kicked him behind the knees to make him kneel before their headman’s headman.

Fright Mask addressed the audience of pirates, priests, red sashes and prisoners in a booming voice, punctuated by punches thrown at the night sky. Ryan couldn’t understand a word of it, but it drew rounds of cheers from the red sashes.

He glanced back at Krysty and the others. They stood helpless, outnumbered, awaiting whatever fate this jabbering asshole had in mind.

Fright Mask shouted something down at him to get his attention.

Ryan squinted up at the hellish mask of flesh. “Speak English, fuckhead,” he snarled back.

The bossman called out impatiently to the rest of the gathered slaves. Ryan thought he caught the now-familiar word “Shi-ball-an-kay.”

Doc shouted something back in Spanish and was immediately dragged from line and forced to his knees beside Ryan.

“So here we are,” Doc said with resignation.

Fright Mask yelled something in Doc’s face. As he did so, saliva spilled from the corners of his vast, carved mouth, gooey, yo-yoing strands drooling onto his gilded battle armor.

“This strikingly handsome fellow wants to make certain you know that he’s a high muckety-muck,” Doc loosely translated. “Governor of the city-state of Veracruz. His name’s al Modo, Generalissimo al Modo.”

Fright Mask yelled some more, this time at considerable length.

“Apparently,” Doc continued during a pause in the tirade, “the governor-general, here, is of the firm opinion that your capture and that of someone he calls Hunahpu, represents the turning point in a war waged by the Lords of Death since the day of creation, itself.”

“How worried should I be?”

“Very worried,” Doc said. “As should the rest of us. The governor says you will be tried by a duly assembled religious tribunal tomorrow and then executed pursuant to holy writ before the following dawn. What your supposed crimes are, he did not elaborate.”

Ryan glowered at the priests he presumed would be sitting in final judgment on him. “Does it really matter?”

“Perhaps not,” Doc said. The time-traveler stared him in the eye, his haggard face full of anguish and sorrow. “You and I have come an awful long way to take our leaves in a place such as this,” he said, “with our hands and feet bound, and our weapons out of reach.”

“Doc, no matter how bad it looks, this isn’t over yet,” Ryan said. “Don’t give up. Don’t let the others give up, either.”

As Doc was dragged away, he called out to Ryan. “I pray we meet again, my dear friend, if not in the here and now, then somewhere beyond this fucking vale of tears.”

“Remember the islander boy,” Ryan called to him. “Remember Garwood Reed.”

Something slammed into his left temple so hard that it made him see stars. He looked up at Fright Mask, who showed him a balled, metal-gauntleted fist. Ryan was grateful for the blow, which allowed him to focus his anger.

“Unchain me for a minute,” Ryan told his captor, “and I’ll widen that smile all the way to the back of your head.”

The governor-general didn’t understand the threat, and so ignored it. He gestured to the pirates, who pulled Ryan to his feet and hauled him off to one side.