There was nothing in front of them but empty sea.
An hour later they caught their first glimpse of Padre Island through Tom’s binocs. When it was Mildred’s turn to look, she aimed the lenses at the dark blip on the horizon to the seaward, along the curve of shoal that divided the Intracoastal Waterway from the Gulf. She saw the top of the grounded ship’s radar mast and the tattered, enormous Lone Star flag flapping against the bright blue sky.
Shortly thereafter, Tom shouted a warning to the passengers to mind the boom, then made an abrupt course change, steering toward shore. He ran the vessel through Aransas Pass, which had once separated Mustang Island and San Jose Island. Both landmasses were gone now, but the deep water channel between them still remained.
Tempest
entered the Intracoastal Waterway and continued southwest, pushed by a steady breeze.
As they steadily bore down on their target, more and more mast became visible. The top third of the freighter’s towering rear smokestack was missing. The white bridge and wheelhouse atop the aft superstructure appeared. Then gradually, the whole ship came into view. It looked as if a giant hand had carefully lifted, then set the freighter down on dry land. It rested on its keel, slightly canted to port, on the highest point of the island. The top deck was still stacked three-high in places with cargo containers; some had tumbled over the side and onto the sand.
“How long since you been here?” Ryan asked the captain.
“Almost two months,” Tom said. “After I arranged for the scroungers to get the C-4, I sailed away east. I’ve been all the way to the Linas and back since then. I had a shipload of islander goods to move. Shoes. Clothes. Ammo. You’re not going to believe the predark stuff they’ve got in that freighter.”
“Your ship’s pretty much empty, though,” Krysty said. “You traded the islander goods for what?”
“Small objects of big value to barons,” Tom said. “Easily concealed. Gold and silver rings, bracelets, teeth.”
“I don’t get it,” Mildred said, changing the subject. “What was the SOS flare all about? Is the ship that fired it farther to the south? Is that why we haven’t come across it? Or did it sink without a trace before we reached it?”
“Neither of those things is likely,” Tom said. “If the ship had been farther away, over the horizon, we wouldn’t have seen the flare. If the ship had run aground on one of the sand bars, it would still be stuck there. I think the signal came from the island. The distance is about right. It was probably nothing. Just some of the kids playing around. The place is crawling with them. Islanders take their breeding serious.”
As they scooted along the outer edge of Corpus Christi Bay, Mildred glanced over at the ruins of Corpus, itself. Aside from the skeletal skyline, there wasn’t much to see. The city was derelict, flooded, abandoned and overgrown.
At the northeast corner of Padre Island, on the edge of a low bluff, was a partially buried gun position. The bunker was roofed and reinforced with layers of corrugated steel hacked from cargo containers. It was also heavily sandbagged. The firing port was a dark slit that ran the width of the emplacement. Mildred could make out the muzzle and ramp front sight of a heavy machine gun just inside the opening. No faces popped up as they glided by. And the MG’s sights didn’t turn and track them.
If there were guns on the freighter, she couldn’t see them. The up-angle to the top deck was too steep. She could see through the underside of the radar mast’s steel mesh platform. The flag was flying but nobody was watching the store.
Ahead was the ruin of the JFK Causeway bridge, which had connected Padre to the mainland. Only the footings on either end of the bridge remained intact; the deck had fallen into the channel. Tom steered
Tempest
to the deepest part of the waterway, then slipped between the jutting stubs of the bridge pilings.
The ship began to lose way as it swung into the island’s lee. The captain cut in close to the shore, taking the shortest route to the protected anchorage.
The beach was deserted. There were no other ships in the bay.
“Where is everybody?” Ryan said.
“Is something wrong?” Krysty said.
“No,” Tom assured them. “Ships come and go all the time. Sometimes the bay is packed, sometimes it’s empty.”
“What about the people?” Krysty said. “You said there were lots of kids.”
“Dunno,” Tom said, scratching the stubble on his chin. “Weird that there’s no cook smoke rising from the ville.”
He didn’t seem worried, just a bit puzzled.
The rusting bow of the
Yoko Maru
loomed above the ville’s clustered shacks, cresting an immense wave of sand. Mildred could imagine the next instant, the Lilliputian hovels squashed flat under its weight. There were maybe a hundred ramshackle dwellings built along the slope that led down to the anchorage, separated by winding, narrow lanes.
It was hardly an impressive trading center, even by Deathlands’ minimal standards. The residential shacks were not much bigger than the outhouses. And there was debris everywhere. Paper, metal and plastic.
“So the islanders are all in the freighter?” Mildred asked.
“There’s no place else for them to be,” Tom said. “Mebbe they’re taking inventory. Mebbe they’re counting their kids. They ain’t all run off, that’s for sure. Wouldn’t leave their pot of gold.”
With that, Tom dropped his sails and coasted into the middle of the anchorage. As the ship rapidly lost speed, he hopped out of the cockpit and ran forward to lower the anchor. The chain rattled off, then the hook struck bottom. Momentum carried the ship forward. Tom continued paying out more chain until he had the proper scope, then he locked it off with an eyebolt.
As
Tempest
swung around at anchor, the captain stared at the deserted beach, hands on hips. Without a word he walked back to the cockpit and furiously rang the ship’s bell.
The clanging echoed in the distance.
Nothing stirred on the land.
“That should have brought out the camp dogs,” Tom said.
There was no evidence of dogs, not so much as a bark.
Mildred suddenly got a creepy-crawly feeling. Not just that something wasn’t right; that something was very wrong. She wasn’t alone.
“Perhaps, dear friends,” Doc said, “we should rethink our plan of action. Perhaps our going ashore this afternoon isn’t such a good idea, after all. Perhaps a better course would be for us to move on while we can. Surely the East Coast barons will pay well enough for the explosive—”
“We’re already here,” Tom said.
“He’s right,” Ryan said. “We’ve come a long way in the wrong direction to sell the plastique to the East Coast barons. Least we can do is check it out. If it doesn’t look right, we’ll make tracks in a hurry.”
“Leave the C-4 belowdecks for now,” the skipper told them. “It’ll just slow down the recce. We can come back for it if everything’s okay.”
Ryan and Doc helped the captain swing and lower a gantried twelve-foot raft over the side.
“Mebbe you’d better stay behind,” Tom said to J.B. “You’re gonna have a hell of a time getting in and out of the dinghy.”
“I’m fine,” J.B. said through clenched teeth.
“You might be able to carry that scattergun,” the captain went on, “but shooting it is going to cause you a world of hurt. No reason for you to take the chance of injuring yourself more.”
“I’ll be just fine.”
Ryan and Tom helped the others down into the boat, then they climbed in themselves. Seven people made the dinghy mighty cramped, but the distance to the island was short, no more than seventy-five yards.
When everybody was seated and as comfortable as they were going to get, Tom put out the oars and, leaning his back into it, began rowing them to shore. Ryan sat on the bow, his longblaster at the ready, scope lens uncapped. Just in case.
As the inflatable raft skidded up onto the beach a smell enveloped them. Rank. Fecund. Eye-watering.
Unmistakable.
“That ain’t home cookin’,” J.B. said.
Daniel Desipio shielded his eyes from the sun with the flat of his hand, searching the horizon to the southwest for a sign of the oncoming Matachìn miniarmada. The pirate ships first appeared as a row of dark dots in the seam between sea and sky, then vanished one by one as they slipped into the trough of the offshore swell, reappearing again as they climbed the crest. Disappearing. Reappearing.
As the vessels crept closer and closer to the island, with his naked eye Daniel could distinguish three low, squat shapes, which he knew were oceangoing tugs. No plumes of dark brown smoke pumped up from their stacks. To save precious fuel, the tugs were under “people power” until they closed on the target. There were plenty of able-bodied rowers to choose from, former residents of Browns and Matamoros villes conscripted into service at blaster and blade point. The Matachìn had all the time in the world to reach their destination. Their quarry wasn’t going anywhere, and for damned sure reinforcements weren’t on the way.
Sweeping in front of the trio of tugs, four sailing ships beat back and forth to make headway against the breeze. They were the fleet’s pursuit and interdiction craft.
Though the hour of slaughter grew near, the Texas sky showed no hint of turning black; nor the Gulf of turning red as blood. The Vikings and Martians of Daniel’s fireside tale were artifacts of
Slaughter Realms,
figments of an anonymous cumulative imagination; they were not the pirates’ closest allies. The Matachìn relied on their own mythic savagery—and mortar barrage—to put the fear of death into intended victims. The predark tugs carried more than enough ordnance to dismantle Padre’s stationary defenses. They carried enough HE to flatten the place, end to end. And the master of the fleet was no stranger to excess.
Under the command of machete-wielding Commander Guillermo Casacampo the venerable nautical catch phrase “All hands on deck!” took on a grisly literal meaning. Post-conquest, the hands of the defeated lay severed and scattered along the scuppers of his flagship while their former owners bobbed like corks in the armada’s wake, waving bloody stumps.
When the ships came within ten miles of the island they started to spread out to their assigned attack positions. Although there were no sounds of alarm from the
Yoko Maru,
the surviving islanders had to be able to see what was coming; they had to be getting nervous. Daniel was starting to get nervous, too. This part of the operation always gave him butterflies. He had seen things go sour before.
Matachìn cannon crews in a chill frenzy tended to lose focus and get swept up in the moment. The really big worry, however, was Casacampo, himself. His ships could only carry and feed so many slaves, and stow only so much booty. They already had gathered more than enough of both from the previous two sackings. Under the circumstances the commander was free to take even wider liberties with human lives.
Including Daniel’s.
After all, he wasn’t the only plague vector at their disposal.
Disposal being the operative word.
He hurried away from the shore. It was time to relocate to a nice, safe place.
The job of disease vector was no cakewalk. Accidents happened in the heat of battle; shrapnel was indiscriminate, as was automatic weapon fire. Sometimes dengue carriers infiltrating a new ville were murdered just because they were strangers, or for some other reason unrelated to the threat they posed. Not all of them were Fire Talkers. Some were whores, some were traders, some were mercies. Or combinations of same. The key was sociability. Making new friends.
Daniel climbed to the top of the dunes and jogged along the ridge to make better time. He had already scoped out the best spot, in the center of the island as far as possible from the machine-gun emplacements, the ville and the grounded freighter—the main targets of the Matachìn gunners. While the folks abandoned in the ville struggled in their death throes, he had dug himself a deep, narrow foxhole in the sand.
At times like these the freezie saw himself as Faust, selling his soul not once, but to a succession of ever more fiendish devils. The first mortgage was given to the publisher of
Slaughter Realms
in return for the warm glow of seeing his very own words in print. To escape the bottomless sink hole of wage slave-hood that was series publishing, he had thrown himself at the mercy of scientists by answering an ad in the back of an alternative throwaway newspaper for “medical research subjects, some foreign travel required, top pay and stock options.”
The initial interview and physical exam had gone well; he had been offered the job of human lab rat, which paid close to ten times his current annual salary. The details of the research program were skimmed over with platitudes about “saving humanity,” “ending suffering” and promises of “virtually no personal risk.” All Daniel could see were the dollar signs and the opportunity to uncover something exciting to write about, something worthy of his talent and devotion, something that would bring him the acclaim and reward he deserved. It seemed like a win-win.
The moment he arrived at the remote Panamanian research site, a former maximum security prison in the heart of an immense rain-forested island, he realized he’d made a frying-pan-into-the-fire mistake. As it turned out, the ultrasecret Project Persephone was black box military. Not only was it underfunded and undersupervised, the grave dangers to participants had been purposefully concealed. Once boots were on the ground, there was no way to back out of the deal, either.
In the first six months of captivity, close to ninety percent of his fellow volunteer test subjects had died from the biological weapon experiments. That Daniel had survived the agonies of infection was a double-edged sword. The experience had turned him into a carrier of weaponized, hemorrhagic dengue flavivirus. He was a walking disease factory. He couldn’t return to civilization without spreading the bioengineered plague. He was stuck in the stinking, sweltering jungle.
So much for spending all the money he’d been promised.
So much for dreams of using the experience to become a bestselling writer.
Eventually, the Project Persephone scientists had convinced him that his only hope was cryogenesis, that some point in the future a cure would be found and he’d be free to rejoin humanity.
A little more than a century later, thawed out in a time that still offered no cure, he had signed the third Faustian pact, this one with the worst of the lot, the Lords of Death, also known as the Xibalban.
The other options on the table were death by torture and suicide.
Atapul X, the highest ranking of the Lords of Death, made Commander Casacampo look like Mother Teresa. He was living proof that evil, along with eye and hair color, resided in the genes.
Daniel remembered Atapul X’s distant ancestor most vividly. When he had first arrived at the decaying compound’s helipad, Atapul Suarez-Denizac had been one of the prisoners held over from the Noriega days, still incarcerated because he was too dangerous to transport. The last surviving inmates of Panama’s Devil’s Island were glue- and gasoline-sniffing, brain-damaged mass murderers and rapists. They had been sold as a job lot to the Project Persephone scientists, part of the shabby furnishings of the moldy concrete prison, to do with whatever they pleased.
While Daniel was enduring the scientists’ experimentation, Suarez-Denizac, a homicidal maniac with delusions of grandeur, had led a violent prisoner escape into the bush. Living in dense forest among the crocodiles, Bushmasters, vampire bats and packs of feral dogs, the escapees had turned cannibal, waylaying and devouring the military police who tried to track them down. By the time the ringleader was recaptured by prison authorities Daniel was already in cryostasis, locked away in the bowels of the main structure. As the legend went, Suarez-Denizac had renamed himself Atapul the First after Armageddon and the fall of the whitecoat compound.
By an unhappy and tragic twist of fate, the psychotic delusions of Suarez-Denizac turned out to be pretty much on the money, as five generations of subsequent history would attest.
Daniel was about to jump down into the hidey-hole he’d prepared when out of the corner of his eye he caught a blur of movement. He turned and through the long strands of dune grass, saw the top of a three-masted ship, sails furled, as it glided to a stop in the otherwise deserted anchorage.
A seagoing trader arriving late to the party. And the skipper and crew couldn’t see what was bearing down on the other side of the island.
The unlucky fucks, he acknowledged, were about to get the surprise of their lives.