James Axler - Dark Resurrection

At blasterpoint, Ryan, his battlemates and young Reed were forced to climb into the back of the first stake truck. Like the other two vehicles, it was aimed toward the city center. When the bed was crammed full of slaves, thirty or so in all, a sec man slammed shut the wooden rear gate. The remaining trucks were likewise loaded and locked.

Red-sashed sec men surrounded the vehicles, laboring to keep the crowd from surging forward and overrunning the prisoners. The companions had automatically moved back to back, in a tight defensive ring. Garwood Reed did as he’d been told: he stuck to Ryan’s side like glue.

All three trucks gunned their engines and started honking for the mob to make way. Nobody budged. And there were too many people on the pier for the vehicles to force the issue.

Then the Matachìn started trooping off the tugs and onto the dock. They advanced in a tight, military formation with their commander, the guy with the tallest piled dreads and the most pillaged jewelry, marching in the lead.

When the assembled people of Veracruz saw the pirates in full battle gear and weapons bearing down on them, they made tracks backward. And they did something else that surprised the hell out of Ryan. Those closest to the Matachìn immediately dropped to their knees and pressed their noses and foreheads to the concrete. There wasn’t room on the dock for all of the people to prostrate themselves. Those who couldn’t bow down retreated as far from the pirates as they could, opening a narrow path for the trucks down the middle of the pier.

The pecking order of the men with blasters was established immediately, Ryan noted. The red sashes standing next to the truck whipped off their hats, knelt, and lowered their heads before High Pile, the Matachìn commander. One of them, probably the most senior-ranking, kneaded the brim of his cowboy hat as he spoke and then pointed up at Ryan. His words were lost in the din, but a smile spread over the captain’s greasy face.

High Pile jumped onto the lead truck’s running board, reached through the open passenger window and snatched the microphone from a suddenly struck-mute public address announcer.

“¡La guerra está terminada!” His voice boomed over the recorded music tape loop, boomed over the crowd. “¡Victoria eterna para los reyes de la muerte! ¡Los gemelos heroicos son cautivos!”

The commander repeated the same words over and over, and with every repetition the mob sent up a louder cheer.

“Now, that ’s in Spanish!” Mildred exclaimed.

The companions huddled closer to hear what else she had to say.

“He’s telling them the war is over,” Mildred translated for them. “Eternal victory for the Kings of Death—or maybe the Lords of Death. And the hero twins are captives.”

“Hero twins?” Krysty said.

“It could be a mythological reference, from ancient Mayan,” Mildred said. “I sort of vaguely remember the term—something to do with their creation story, I think. More than a century ago I did some reading to get ready for an archaeological tour of the major Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala. How the phrase applies here and now is beyond me.”

The truck and its human cargo began to roll slowly forward. Out in front, the Matachìn phalanx parted the crowd with unspoken threat. Ryan watched as a wave of prostration broke before them. Regular folk and red sashes alike supplicated themselves, pressing their faces into the ground. This wasn’t a community of equals welcoming home their best and brightest after a successful military campaign; this was a subject people, paying homage.

The convoy proceeded at a walking pace off the pier, past the lighthouse and into the canyon of city streets. High Pile rode the running board, megaphone-assaulting the seemingly endless throng with his news.

Ryan tried to read the sea of brown faces. Mixed in with the overall jubilance, with the mind-numbing cheers, with the legions of fingers pointing excitedly up at him, he saw here and there flickers of shock and even sorrow. The selection of jigged, giant heads-on-sticks was the same as on the pier: there were kings or demons, plague rictus masks and mirror-images of his own bearded visage.

The convoy crawled through a right turn, proceeded a few more blocks and then made a left.

On Ryan’s right, three-and four-story colonial buildings loomed above the narrow street. The wall-to-wall facades were painted in bright pastels—aqua, pink, gold—and draped with spotlighted red banners: stories-long, paint-on-cloth portraits of the array of ferocious kings—or devils. Atapuls I through X varied in skin color and texture, as well as headdress design and height, width of nose, length of extended tongue, and position and shape of fangs.

From every floor, people hung over the Moorishly arched, pillared balconies; some threw brilliantly colored confetti into the air, which fluttered down onto the heads and shoulders of the Matachìn phalanx. Lights burned in every window. At street level, the buildings opened up into cavelike arcades packed with markets and shops. The sidewalks were jammed with spectators and carts, spill-over retail that included hot food, cold drinks, live poultry, cigars and rack after rack of new clothing.

The other side of the avenue was lined with people and hawkers’ carts, too, but there were no buildings, just a row of tall, skinny trees that marked the border of a broad, central park. The park’s pavement was made up of checkerboard marble tiles in white, gray and black. On the other side of the square, high above the tops of the trees, stood the floodlit bell tower of a predark cathedral. It dominated the square, glowing in the lights like an ember, fiery red against the night sky.

As the trucks crept forward, Ryan picked up distinctive odors by turns—camellias, spices, incense, fresh-baked bread, charcoal smoke and grilled meats. This was nothing like Shadow World. That place had been stripped bare by insatiable human appetites, like the ruins of a cornfield after a swarm of locusts. Veracruz was the exact opposite of the parallel earth: it was ripe, fecund, teeming with energy.

“Oh, my God!” Mildred exclaimed, pointing toward the ground floor of one of the buildings with both manacled hands.

“What?” Ryan said.

“It’s a Burger King!” was her cryptic reply.

Further explanation was interrupted by a barrage of garbage. As the trucks came directly under the balconies, the folks up there stopped throwing confetti and started throwing rotten fruit, to the applause of the surrounding mob. The slaves ducked and covered as overripe mango and papaya splattered the bed of the trucks and their defenseless backs.

The volley let up only after the convoy had crawled out of range.

When their truck rounded a corner, Ryan could see it wasn’t the tint of the spotlights that made the cathedral look red; it was painted top to bottom the color of dried blood.

Or maybe it was blood.

The mob packing the cathedral steps broke apart before the wedge of Matachìn. The three-truck convoy stopped. High Pile hopped down from the running board and climbed up to the stone altar that blocked the cathedral’s main entrance. Pungent clouds of incense poured from brass censers on either side of the arched doorway.

An old man with a sagging, deeply seamed face waited for him behind the dished out altar. His headdress was made of scrolled posts and cross-members of gold-painted wood. His brocaded, crimson robe didn’t hide skinny arms and legs, and a round, protruding belly—he looked like a hairless brown spider playing dress-up.

Ryan noticed that while everybody else retreated with their noses pressed to ground, the spider remained upright, as if he and the commander were equal in rank.

Pirate and high priest conferred head-to-head for a moment in the cathedral’s entryway, then with a flourish, the priest unsheathed a long, golden dagger that he held over his head and turned for all to see. The captain shouted an order down to his men. Five Matachìn immediately and gleefully swarmed over the sides of the lead stake truck, jumping down into the midst of the chained slaves.