On the bottom shelf was a long section of dog-earred, paperback, pulp science fiction and fantasy novels. The gaudily jacketed
Slaughter Realms
books were sequentially numbered from 157 to 241, and filed in order of publication. J.B. pulled one out and opened it. He scanned a few random pages. The edges of the brittle, yellowed paper crumbled at his touch.
“Listen to this,” he said. Thumbing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, he read out loud.
“‘Damn you, Ragnar! I’ll soon cleave your fire-furred, Norse wedding tackle from your groinal region!’ The Iroquois ninja princess hurriedly scythed her singing katana around and around her head, making her firm, upthrusting breasts jostle beneath her buckskin doublet ever more wildly with each rotation.
“‘Uff da!’ the Viking leader responded with a guttural roar, ducking under the voracious windmilling attack to snatch up his Martian-made brain armor from the castle’s basaltic flagstones. He clapped the filigreed silver meta-plastic bowl down on his head, bending the tops of his huge pale ears against his scraggly red pigtails, thus anticipating and deflecting the cloud operatives’ flanking maneuver.’”
Krysty put a hand on J.B.’s wrist and gently forced him to lower the book. “Stop, please,” she said. “I’m getting queasy.”
A second or two later the ship turned forty-five degrees and its speed increased markedly. The hiss as the hull split water grew much louder, as did the resounding thud and jolt of the bow pounding into and splitting successive wind waves. The vessel heeled over hard to starboard, sending the food containers sliding to that side of the table.
Phantoms cloaked in black bunting swirled in and out of the edges of Okie Moore’s field of vision. Ashen-faced phantoms with huge heads reveled, grimacing and grinding their long teeth. Their mirror-polished black boots shuffled and scraped on the floor’s planking; dust motes rose like smoke in the wedge of sunlight that burst through the hut’s doorless doorway.
Okie lay on his back in a vile puddle, hallucinating. It was the middle of the afternoon, the hottest part of the day. He couldn’t get up. He was so weak he couldn’t lift a hand to shoo away the flies drinking his tears and blood. It took all his strength just to suck the next breath. He lay slow-baking in the hut-oven, amid the reek of decomposition, shit and piss. The bare mattress beneath him was soaked with all three.
On the fourth day of the sickness, his terrible fever had abated, leaving him shaken and drained. He had thought it was finally over. He was wrong. On the fifth day, the fever returned with a vengeance. And along with it, new and horrible symptoms: bleeding from gums, nose and ass. Bright red spots had popped out all over his body. Bathed in cold sweat, his pulse rapid and thready, he had collapsed.
That was yesterday. He hadn’t moved since.
He was not alone in the hut.
His two wives lay on either side of him on their backs, dead; the babies in their protruding bellies, dead. Two of his six children had been taken to the
Yoko Maru
because they had shown no sign of the illness. Everyone who had come down sick had been left in the ville, abandoned there to die. Okie’s other children lay around him, caught in the same awful grip as he. He couldn’t tell if they were alive. Even if he could have turned his head to the side, he couldn’t have seen them. The light spearing in from the doorway didn’t reach into the corners where they lay huddled.
There had never been a sickness like this before. Not in anyone’s memory. A sickness that struck so many simultaneously, like a lightning bolt, with blinding headaches, high fever, bone-breaking pain and vomiting. A sickness that dropped people squarely in their tracks. In less than two days, the social fabric of the island had come unraveled. Bodies lay unburied not only inside the ville’s squalid huts, but in the winding, narrow lanes and along the Gulf shore.
Ghastly pale visages loomed closer to his bed of pain, pressing in on him from all sides, blocking his view of the hut’s dim ceiling. Outsize noses and ears, too-large eyes and mouths mocked his suffering and his grief. The bunting that trailed from the phantoms’ elbows brushed across his bare skin like an open flame.
Okie knew he was dying.
The how of it was an unsolvable mystery. Any one of the island’s recent visitors could have brought the terrible sickness with them. The traders had all sailed away before the outbreak. The Fire Talker had fallen ill along with everyone else. In point of fact, who gave what to whom no longer mattered. It was done. “Why me?” The question he had asked himself over and over had no meaning, either. He had neither the strength nor the mental focus for outrage.
When folds of coarse, gauzy fabric grazed his forehead and fell down over his eyes, Okie did not struggle. Beaten, destroyed, he was ready to depart the world of flesh. Deep in his chest, he felt a stabbing, tearing, transecting pain, then hot blood gushed from his lungs into his throat, filling it. He coughed, and gore sprayed over his chest and drooled down the sides of his face and neck. His throat refilled at once as the massive hemorrhaging continued. There was no end to it. Buckets of his own blood choked him, and then drowned him. As his consciousness faded, long, powerful arms lifted him from the sodden pallet. To his horror, he was not carried up through the roof into the bright and open sky, but down through the floor into smothering blackness.
Into the pit.
D
ANIEL
D
ESIPIO STROLLED
around the perimeter of the vacated ville, his survivalist do-rag tied over his nose and mouth in a futile attempt to filter out the stench of death. There was no longer any need to pretend he was one of the stricken. He was the only person moving. Everyone else was either deceased or on the verge of same, or otherwise incapacitated. He guessed at least one hundred people, fully half the island’s population, were down and out. Without his lifting so much as a finger.
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Body count was still a central focus in his life.
Unlike Typhoid Mary, his early twentieth-century predecessor, Daniel didn’t deny that he was the source of the plague. What he did deny was that it was his responsibility. After all, he hadn’t asked to be turned into a living bioweapon, it was something that had been done to him. He saw himself as the quintessential victim. If he had had any sympathy for those he infected, he might have summoned the courage to take his own life. Absent sympathy, he felt only hate for his victims. He loathed them for their weakness, blamed them for their susceptibility to the flavivirus, and saw them as the root cause of his predicament. After all, if nobody got sick from the disease he carried, if it hadn’t made people die like flies, he’d have been a free man.
To his left, a shallow pit had been opened in the beach sand and bloated corpses tumbled in, their limbs tangled together. He pulled the camouflage do-rag tighter over his face. Shovels lay discarded at the verge of the hole. Panic had set in, as it always did, when disease swept through like a firestorm. The still-healthy had abandoned the dead and the sick, taking shelter in the freighter. As if that could protect them.
Part of Daniel, the needy, greedy core of who he was, reveled in the avalanche of destruction he had wrought. He dimly remembered sitting on a summer sidewalk in shorts as a small boy, squishing a column of ants one by one with his little pink thumb, and making up a story about himself as a terrible god teaching lessons of fear and obeisance to the helpless and insignificant. The meat of his earliest-remembered power fantasies, the meat of his twenty-nine published books, which were also power fantasies, had come to life. He had become a force of nature, albeit uncontrollable.
A four-year-old with bigger thumbs.
Although that small, hidden part of him rejoiced as he took in the carnage, Daniel felt a growing sense of unease, of emptiness, even despair. Not because of the indiscriminate loss of innocent life, but by what the looming, one-sided victory presaged.
Reconfinement.
Daniel’s liberty, such as it was, was about to come to an end. He had at most a few hours of freedom left. Like a trained bird of prey, again and again his masters released him to perform a single murderous trick, then when the trick was done, he was reeled back and returned to his cage. Literally. What he bore in his blood was far too dangerous for there to be any option but solitary imprisonment.
Why didn’t he seize the opportunity to get away while he still had the chance? Why didn’t he push a boat off the beach and head for the mainland as fast as he could row? What held him shackled when his overseers were miles away?
Daniel Desipio was not a bird of prey. He was not a hunter; he was not even a gatherer. He was a talker; even in his predark profession, he’d been a squawking parrot in a flock of same. He lacked the physical skills and training, and the inclination to exist as a solo predator. And he couldn’t function as a social animal in close contact and cooperation with others of his kind. It was guaranteed that if he removed himself to some backwater ville, close to half the residents would be dead within a week’s time. Those who recovered from the first round of illness would be taken in the second round, after they were reinfected by mosquitos. If he revealed his predicament in advance to those offering him hospitality, he could expect to be chilled on the spot, and his body burned to ashes. There was no way around it. The evil seed that lurked in his blood chained him invisibly to the jailers who fed, clothed and protected him.
The other reason he could not summon the will to flee was fear.
Fear of what would happen to him if he was caught running away.
Daniel circled wide around the antipersonnel-mined paths and headed across the littered dunes for the northwest tip of the island. He had watched the Claymores being positioned and armed, amused by the islanders’ defense plan. There was no reason for the Matachìn to enter the ville proper before assaulting the freighter. The dying couldn’t be saved; there was no treatment for the genetically engineered plague. Islanders in the ship with natural resistance to the virus—those who only came down with flulike symptoms, or the few who showed no signs of infection—would be pacified and then taken as part of the spoils, as slaves.
With the ville and its reek well behind him, he moved the do-rag from over his nose and mouth and retied it around his head. As he walked he sucked down the salt air blowing off the Gulf, felt the humid breeze on his face, the sun on his back, and heard the waves lapping against the shore. Daniel tried to soak it all in, to hold the experience, but he knew that every step took him closer to the door of his cage. And with every step, he grew more distraught. His lower lip began to quiver and his eyes brimmed with tears.
The heavy machine gun position on the southwest point of the island was manned, but only technically. The two gunners inside the bunker were slumped against the sandbags and steel plate, still conscious but clearly showing signs of the sickness. They moaned as he strode past.
There was no one to stop him, no one to challenge him.
Daniel walked to the tip of the point, to the edge of the water, and took a signal flare from his vest. He pulled the striker tab and held the tube over his head. The flare whooshed and sizzled, shooting high into the sky. The rocket exploded with a loud pop, flashing fluorescent pink and billowing pink smoke. He tossed the spent tube aside, squinting at the horizon line.
The pirate fleet waited just beyond the curve of the earth, watching for his signal. As terrible as they were, the Matachìn were the instruments, the familiars of something infinitely worse.
As was he.
More than a century ago, Daniel recalled reading some obscure scientist’s theory about the nature of thought, which put forward the proposition that ideas operate like viruses, with no reproductive machinery of their own, spreading from brain to brain, mutating over the course of transmission. Like viruses, some ideas were harmless, others were anything but. The idea that now stalked the earth was an ancient legend. It had had 1500 years—and the assistance of Armageddon—to evolve and flower. Unlike
Slaughter Realms,
it was not cobbled together by a committee of English Lit majors from bits and pieces of crosscultural fables, a slapdash reassembly that diluted and eviscerated the underlying power. This legend was pure. It was complete. Much of what had passed for entertainment in predark popular culture was a pale imitation or parody of the basic concept: that the world was a shambles, the playground of insane demons.
This was neither imitation nor parody. Daniel had seen the truth of it with his own two eyes.
An abrupt change in the pitch and roll of the ship woke Mildred and she couldn’t fall back to sleep. She lay beside J.B. in one of the bow’s vee berths, hanging on as
Tempest
pounded through rising waves. Outside a torrential rain was falling. It drummed on the top deck and sizzled on the surface of the sea. There was so much water vapor in the air it was hard to breathe.
Beside her, J.B. was oblivious to the passing storm. He snored softly, peacefully, as if nothing had changed.
Mebbe for him it hadn’t.
But for Mildred everything felt different. Everything.
That’s what hope could do, she thought.
Memories from her life before cryogenesis, before skydark had returned in a flood. Suppressed memories of who she’d been, what she’d done, her professional interests, her daily routines, her hobbies, her colleagues and friends. She vividly remembered the sense of safety a complex, organized, global society provided. She remembered the overwhelming amount of goods and services within easy reach. She remembered electricity, flush toilets, refrigeration, a hot bath whenever she wanted and the deluge of information: books, movies, music, Internet.
Virtually everything she had devoted her life to prior to Armageddon was for naught in Deathlands. There was no science. No real medicine. No search for knowledge. There was only the gun.
And using it to stay alive. J.B., Krysty and Jak couldn’t conceive of a world otherwise. A world where people depended on millions of others, but at the same time, within agreed-upon limits, had some independence. Where the public will produced mass transit, and mass food and energy. The companions’ only experience of a higher social organization was the baronies, a corrupt, poisonous feudal system based on oppression and exploitation. The idea of government devoted to the common good was alien to them—they suspected it was simply the baronies all over again, only on a grander scale.
She had tried to talk to J.B. about it. But it was like trying to explain swimming to someone who’d never seen water.
What Tom had said about the future of Deathlands made perfect sense. The current level of culture, savage though it was, was propped up by artifacts from the highest point of human industry and civilization. If anybody in the hellscape knew how to rebuild or operate the machines that had made that explosion of mass production possible, Mildred had never met them or heard tell. The requisite skills in math and engineering had been lost in the century of chaos after the all-out missile exchange. To create those skills in the first place, society had had to evolve to the point where a separate techno-scientific class could flourish and develop.
How long had it taken for someone like Galileo to appear? Who paid his rent?
As Tom saw it, the devolution of Deathlands had been postponed by the stockpiles and caches of predark goods that had survived the nukecaust. Therefore, Deathlands hadn’t hit bottom, yet. Based on what Mildred had witnessed and endured so far, rock bottom was going to be triple ugly.
The idea of leaving the others, perhaps never seeing them again, was very painful for Mildred to even consider. She owed her companions more than she could ever repay. They had resurrected her from a cryotank tomb, they had saved her life over and over. But what she felt more toward them wasn’t just simple gratitude. Though there was certainly friction at times, they were dear friends; her only friends, in fact. More like family.
The differences between their life experiences and hers were buried under the weight of the day-to-day fight for survival. The captain’s proposition had brought those disparities front and center, reminding the others who Mildred Wyeth really was; that part of her belonged to another world. Because she had special feelings for J.B., his pulling away saddened her the most of all. But she understood his reaction. If her world wasn’t lost, he was afraid he couldn’t hold her.
Thrown over for a double-tall frappuccino?
Whoa, that was something she hadn’t thought about in a long time!
As fast as the memory appeared, she pushed it out of her head. There was only one bright spot that she could see: she and Doc still had a chance to change J.B.’s mind, to change all their minds about the voyage south.
After an hour or so, the rain squall passed and seas flattened out a bit. In the wake of the storm the air temperature dropped and Mildred managed to doze off. Sometime later, she awoke, drenched in sweat. The sun had come out again. It blazed through the portholes on either side of the bow.
Mildred carefully rolled out of the berth so as not to wake J.B., then timing her gait with the roll and heave of the boat, she climbed the forward companionway steps to the foredeck.
The wind whipping off the Gulf cooled her down at once. The flying spray was as warm as bathwater. On the landward side, the sea was stained the color of rust, and yellow custard foam topped the waves. The wind carried the smell of baking bread. It wasn’t bread, Mildred knew. The odor was from volatile petrochemicals still seeping into the Gulf from ruptured tanks inland. Iridescent toxins, oils and tars had streaked
Tempest’
s white deck and coaming a nasty yellow-brown.
She looked back toward the stern and saw the captain and Ryan standing in the cockpit, talking. Over the wind singing in the lines and the hiss and slap of the hull she couldn’t make out their words.
Mildred moved aft, holding on to the stays and starboard rail, and climbed down into the cockpit.
“Rough as a cob for a while there,” Tom said to her. “Sorry, but I couldn’t run around it. Too big a squall and it was coming too fast.”
“No problem,” Mildred said. She glanced up at the stern rail. The rail-mounted machine gun was still shrouded in its waxed canvas. “I take it we’re still clear of pursuit?”
“Lucked out so far,” Ryan said.
“The competition is probably laying further offshore to stay out of the weather,” Tom said.
The two seemed to get along well, Mildred noted. That wasn’t surprising. Both were products of the hellscape, and they were in many ways similar. Stoic. Determined. Battle-seasoned. Fearless. Men of legendary prowess who didn’t give a good goddamn what folks said or thought of them.
It had already occurred to Mildred that Ryan might be more intrigued by the voyage of exploration than the other three Deathlanders. After all, he had been trawled to the shadow world, a parallel earth that had missed the nukecaust and was by far the worse for it. That experience had forcibly opened his eye to other possibilities. To alternatives to the status quo.
Though he was a leader, Ryan was also very much his own person, a craggy promontory in the hellstorm. It seemed Harmonica Tom had touched a nerve; Ryan was taking his offer seriously, unlike the others. Mildred knew their hunker-down mentality could have been the product of exhaustion. All of them had expended strenuous effort in the preceding twenty-four hours, running and fighting while dehydrated and half-starved. If it was a temporary stubbornness, only time, rest and more food would tell.
Tempest
soon left the rusty sea behind. The edge of the discolored water was a stark borderline where suspended rust turned to deep emerald green. Beyond it, the Gulf’s swell became widely spaced and even. They were making excellent time, with a steady wind and clear sailing ahead.
“I’m nuked,” Tom admitted, trying to work the kinks out of the back of his neck with his fingertips. “Got to shut my eyes for a little while. Can you handle the ship and hold course while I have a snooze?”
“Sure,” Ryan said, taking over the helm.
“Keep the wind at your back,” Tom advised as he started down the companionway steps. He winked at Mildred. “And don’t run into anything big.”
J
UST AFTER NOON
, with Tom back in command, they approached the eastern tip of what had once been North Padre Island. Stretching ahead of them to the southwest, as far as the eye could see, was a vast curve of intermittently breaking surf. Small waves crashed on the patchy, seemingly endless offshore shoal. Like an abandoned spiderweb, hummocks of barely submerged sand caught ships. There were derelicts as old as skydark: cadaverous tankers, freighters and shrimpers. Some of the wreckage was smaller, made of fiberglass, and far more recent—the shoal was still catching traders’ ships. There were no lighthouses, no warning buoys marking the shallow water. The capsized, rusted-out hulks were a testament to the limits of dead reckoning.
“Another twenty miles to the ville,” Tom announced. “Two hours mebbe, and we’ll be there.”
One by one the other companions stirred themselves from belowdecks. Jak beelined for the bowsprit, and there he sat, his ghostly face into the breeze, his long white hair flying behind his head. Doc and Krysty joined Ryan and Tom in the cockpit. J.B. was the last to come up for air. He climbed the steep steps slowly, like an old man. His ribs had really stiffened up during the night. He groaned as he took a seat on the padded bench beside Mildred, cradling his chest with a forearm.
“Want me to rewrap your ribs?” she asked him with concern. “Has the bandage come loose?”
“No, it’s okay,” he said. “The ship rolled and I caught myself wrong. I’ll be fine in a minute.” With that, he tipped his fedora down over his eyes, settled into the seat cushion and seemed to go back to sleep.
He didn’t want to discuss his pain, which from experience Mildred guessed meant he was hurting plenty. There was nothing she could do about that; she couldn’t even offer him an aspirin. Barring compound fracture and lung punctures, rib injuries were customarily left to heal on their own. And at their own pace. J.B. was going to be hurting for a good long while.
Six miles away, on the far side of the shoal, was the mainland coast, the southernmost edge of the much-feared Dallas-Houston death zone. What Mildred saw was a dark green wall of mangrove branches and the sun gleaming off trapped backwaters. Above the treetops, skeletal structures protruded, some of them clearly industrial with cylindrical, four-story-tall holding tanks and latticework walkways; others looked like condo towers gutted down to poured concrete walls and floors. Everything was draped with verdurous creepers. Mosses and vines trailed down to the waterline.
At the base of the trees, where the beach should have been, lay an unbroken, miles long pile of rubbish. The partially submerged junk had been backwashed off the land as successive tidal waves receded. A peek through binocs revealed cars and trucks filigreed with rust. Disintegrating sofas and mattresses. Battered refrigerators, washers and dryers. On top of it lay the lighter stuff: heaps of splintered wood, plastic and aluminum.
Deeper in the mangrove swamp, dense black smoke boiled up through the canopy and blew inland. There were no visible flames, just smoke. A huge section of the backwater burned. Something floating on the water had caught fire, oil or gasoline, Mildred thought. Perhaps set off by a lightning strike.
“What are you looking for?” Ryan asked the skipper who was leaning over the port rail and scanning the horizon ahead, this while keeping a one-handed course a quarter mile from the edge of the breaking surf.
“Looking for the
Yoko Maru’
s radar mast,” Harmonica Tom said. “We’ll be able to see the top of the mast long before we catch sight of the island. Got to be four hundred feet off the ground.”
From his perch in the bowsprit, Jak let out a cry. “Lookee!” He pointed to the horizon.
It wasn’t a mast.
Tom cut the wheel hard over to starboard, giving everyone a full-on view of a brilliant pink light low in the sky, slowly sinking out of sight over the curve of the earth.
“Signal flare,” Ryan said.
“From a ship?” Krysty said.
“Probably,” the captain replied.
“How far off?” Mildred said.
“Hard to tell,” Tom told her. “A ways.”
“May we assume that some unfortunates ran their vessel aground?” Doc asked.
“Could be,” the skipper said. “Take the helm, Ryan.”
Harmonica Tom pulled the waxed shroud off the stern-mounted blaster and tossed it into the cockpit. The Soviet-made PKM light machine gun sported an unfluted barrel, and a skeletonized rear plastic stock and pistol grip. It had no carrying handle atop the action; instead of a bipod, it pivoted 180 degrees on a stand clamped to the rail. Under the receiver like a gigantic, olive-drab sardine can on its side, a 100-round-belt, boxed mag rode horizontally. The action and barrel glistened with protective grease. The business end of the ammo belt was already in the feedway. After removing and pocketing the muzzle plug, Tom dropped the selector switch from safety to fire, then charged the cocking handle. With a crisp clack the first 7.62 mm round chambered. Ready to rip.
“Would traders-turned-pirate use an emergency SOS flare to lure another ship in close?” Mildred asked.
By way of answer Tom said, “Mebbe a couple of you should go below and stock up on ammo for everybody. There’s a hatch under the rubber mat in the forward cabin. Pull out the big plastic tubs. It’s all boxed and clearly marked caliber and load. You should find everything you need.”
Jak and Doc went below to gather up the requisite ammo and J.B.’s shotgun and Ryan’s scoped longblaster. Everyone else watched the horizon for the ship that had sent up the flare.
Minutes passed. Jak and Doc returned with the bullets. They all reloaded their weapons and their extra mags. More time passed.