Dark Resurrection. James Axler
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cheeks were streaked by tears, their lips trembling, their eyes wide with fear and panic at the prospect of an unknown fate.
Faced with the self-same prospect, his companions had drawn on the last of their physical and mental reserves, turning hard-eyed, resolute, deadly focused. Like Ryan, Mildred, Doc, Jak, Krysty and J.B. were a breed apart, their spirits tempered in the furnace of continual conflict and bodily risk. Unlike their Deathlander fellow slaves, they had little interest in finding a comfortable hole to hunker down in, nor in shouldering leather traces and dragging an iron-tipped plow over rocky soil, nor in crawling through the radioactive nukeglass massifs in search of predark spoils, nor in selling their considerable fighting skills to the highest-bidding baron. They were addicted to the kind of absolute freedom only the hellscape could provide.
Aboard Tempest, in what now seemed like another life, when Doc had proposed they join Harmonica Tom on a southern hemisphere voyage of discovery, none of them ever dreamed it would be undertaken in chains and at the point of a lash.
Now the impossible situation in which Ryan and his comrades found themselves trapped was about to change.
Maybe for the worse.
Maybe not.
In the latter they saw a crack of daylight.
Ryan nudged Mildred gently with his elbow, nodded toward the crescent of lights, and said, “So, that’s what the world looked like before hellday?”
“Pretty much,” she replied.
From the bench on the far side of Mildred, J.B. leaned forward and asked, “Where in nukin’ hell are we? That’s all still Mex, right?”
“I think it’s Veracruz,” the twentieth-century, physician freezie said. “Or maybe Tampico. They were the two closest big port cities.”
One of the Matachìn deck-watch leaned in under the sheet metal awning beside them. He was tricked out in full battle armor. Hanging by his hands on the pipe strut, he unleashed armpit stench with both barrels. There was spattered blood on the canvas scabbard of his gut-hook machete. It was still wet, and it was most certainly human. Slaves too weak to row routinely got the long edge across the backs of their necks before they were tossed over the side like so much garbage. A crazy triumphant look in his eyes, the pirate spoke rapid-fire down at Mildred. Overhearing the words, the Matachìn idling nearby looked on in amusement.
“What did the bastard say to you?” Ryan asked.
Mildred translated. “He said we’re looking at Veracruz City.”
“He said more than that,” J.B. prompted.
“Yeah, he did,” she admitted. “He said next to his world, Deathlands is nothing but shit, and that we Deathlanders will always be shit.”
“An assessment that might have carried more weight,” Doc remarked aridly from a seat on the bench directly behind them, “had his own hairstyle not been adorned with dried sea gull excreta.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Ryan told the pirate. “We’re shit and you’re not.”
The Matachìn scowled and as he did so his right hand dropped to his hip and the pommel of his braided leather lash. English was beyond him, but tone transcended the language barrier.
Mildred spoke up quickly, putting Ryan’s remark into Spanish. Evidently the sarcasm was lost in translation.
With a satisfied sneer, the pirate turned back to his shipmates.
As the ship angled closer to shore, the lay of the coast gradually revealed itself. The curve of a southward-pointing peninsula became distinct from the landmass immediately behind it. The tug beelined for a blinking green beacon that marked the deep channel at the tip of the breakwater. When the ship rounded the bend into the protection of the harbor, they hit the wall of trapped heat and suffocating humidity radiating off the land.
The ship’s horn blasted overhead; the sister ships behind chimed in, as well, announcing the Matachìn convoy’s triumphant return to what Ryan could only guess was its point of origin.
In the lee of the peninsula, under scattered bright lights on tall stanchions, were the remains of a commercial shipyard—docks and cargo cranes. The scale of the development dwarfed what they had seen at Port Arthur ville. The structures hadn’t escaped Armageddon unscathed, though. It looked like they had been slammed by tidal waves or earthquakes. Most of the metal-frame industrial buildings were flattened to their concrete pads. Towering cargo cranes canted at odd angles; some had toppled into the water. The enormous docks were broken, wide sections of decking were missing; moored to the remnants were a hodge-podge of small trading vessels. Beyond the docks, where the peninsula met the mainland, stood a power plant that was fully operational. Floodlights illuminated clouds of smoke or steam from a trio of tall stacks. Over the noise of the diesels, the complex emitted a steady, high-pitched hum.
The lead tug continued, hugging the inside of the peninsula, passing within a hundred yards of another immense structure—a fortress made of heavily weathered, light gray stone, also dramatically lit. Apparently constructed on an offshore island, it was connected to the mainland by a low, stone bridge. Above its crenellated battlements, at either end of the enclosed compound, were cylindrical observation towers. Huge iron anchor rings hung in a row just above the waterline. In front of the high-arched entrance gate, small motor launches were tied up to mooring cleats. Eroded stone sentry boxes bracketed the gate.
The mini-island fortress was a time-worn anachronism, but it had been built to last; it had survived nukeday virtually intact, whereas the twentieth-century artifacts that surrounded it had not.
“It’s an old Spanish fort from colonial days,” Doc ventured. “Probably six hundred or more years old. Those massive, triangular blockhouses outside the corners of the bastion walls are called ravelins. They were designed to defend the main perimeter from attack by offering a protected position for flanking fire. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Spaniards used stone forts like that to store gold and silver mined from the New World. It could also defend the city from pirates and foreign invaders—French, English, American.”
Even bathed in hard, bright light, evil seem to emanate from the structure, from the very seams in its masonry.
Ancient squatting evil.
A consequence of the uncounted thousands who had died as prisoners in its belly, between its teeth, under its claws.
“The question is, what is it now?” Mildred said.
“Those cannons sticking out of the battlements sure as hell aren’t six-hundred-year-old muzzleloaders,” J.B. said. “If I had to guess I’d say they’re at least 106 mm with mebbe a one-mile range. That means nobody comes in or goes out of the harbor without coming under their sights.”
As the tug motored through the sheltered waters of the harbor, past the fort’s arched gate, a gaggle of armed men spilled through it, waving and cheering in welcome. They didn’t look anything like the Matachìn. No dreads. No battle armor. They weren’t wearing uniforms as such, more like insignia. They all had crimson sashes over their right shoulders and opposite hips, and they wore off-white straw cowboy hats with rolled brims. Their shoulder-slung weapons were different from what the Matachìn carried. The wire-stocked, stamped-steel submachine guns were much more compact, like Uzi knock-offs, with the mags inside the pistol grips. Men in crimson sashes continued to pour out of the gate, onto the dock.
“Sec man garrison,” Ryan said flatly.
Fireworks whistled from the battlements, arcing high into the black sky, and there exploding into coruscating patterns of green, gold and red.
The tug chugged on, turning left for the nearby mainland.
Looking over his shoulder at the wreckage of the peninsula, Ryan guessed that it had taken the brunt of nukeday tidal waves, in effect absorbing most of the energy before it reached the city on the inside of the harbor.
Off the bow, Veracruz glowed incandescent against the black-velvet sky. The