Dark Resurrection Read online

  The piles of corpses and severed hearts grew

  Realizing what was coming, the slaves struggled futilely with their bonds, weeping and begging their captors for mercy.

  All but the companions.

  Jak, Krysty, Mildred, Doc, and J.B. were staring at Ryan. Their fixed, defiant expressions all said the same thing: we’re not going to check out like that. Not like chickens on the chopping block.

  The one-eyed warrior nodded in agreement, then he looked away. If they couldn’t escape, they could do the next best thing. They could take out as many of the bastards as possible before they were cut down.

  Ryan Cawdor withdrew deep into the core of his being, shutting out the grisly sights and sounds around him. He wasn’t preparing himself to die, he was preparing to fight and chill to his last ounce of strength. To expend it all, here, now. And when that strength was gone, death could nukin’ well have him, ready or not. It took only a moment for him to make the attitude shift. It was like a gate swinging open.

  And when it was done, Ryan felt a sense of freedom and power.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Seedling

  Dark Carnival

  Chill Factor

  Moon Fate

  Fury’s Pilgrims

  Shockscape

  Deep Empire

  Cold Asylum

  Twilight Children

  Rider, Reaper

  Road Wars

  Trader Redux

  Genesis Echo

  Shadowfall

  Ground Zero

  Emerald Fire

  Bloodlines

  Crossways

  Keepers of the Sun

  Circle Thrice

  Eclipse at Noon

  Stoneface

  Bitter Fruit

  Skydark

  Demons of Eden

  The Mars Arena

  Watersleep

  Nightmare Passage

  Freedom Lost

  Way of the Wolf

  Dark Emblem

  Crucible of Time

  Starfall

  Encounter: Collector’s Edition

  Gemini Rising

  Gaia’s Demise

  Dark Reckoning

  Shadow World

  Pandora’s Redoubt

  Rat King

  Zero City

  Savage Armada

  Judas Strike

  Shadow Fortress

  Sunchild

  Breakthrough

  Salvation Road

  Amazon Gate

  Destiny’s Truth

  Skydark Spawn

  Damnation Road Show

  Devil Riders

  Bloodfire

  Hellbenders

  Separation

  Death Hunt

  Shaking Earth

  Black Harvest

  Vengeance Trail

  Ritual Chill

  Labyrinth

  Sky Raider

  Remember Tomorrow

  Sunspot

  Desert Kings

  Apocalypse Unborn

  Thunder Road

  Plague Lords

  (Empire of Xibalba Book I)

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Dark Resurrection

  EMPIRE OF

  XIBALBA

  BOOK II

  Special thanks to John Todd, Jr., for the insights he so graciously shared about the geography, history and culture of Veracruz, Mexico, and for his Web site’s excellent collection of maps and photographs.

  Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.

  —Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788–1860

  THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

  * * *

  This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

  There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

  But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

  Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

  Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

  J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

  Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

  Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

  Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

  Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

  In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

  * * *

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  John Barrymore Dix staggered forward under the sickening roll of the tugboat’s deck, his stride limited by the steel trace that connected the manacles around his ankles. Rain in wind-driven sheets whipped across his shoulders and back. His clothing was already soaked through, front and rear. Water ran in rivulets down his pant legs and squished inside his boots. His beloved fedora was saturated, as well; moisture steadily leaked through its crown onto the top of his head and peeled over the sides of his face.

  A drowned rat in chains.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Jak Lauren and Krysty Wroth lurched a few feet ahead of him. The albino youth and the tall redhead were similarly drenched, similarly hobbled, weaving from side to side as the slow-moving ship wallowed through oncoming seas.

  Behind the five-foot-six-inch Dix, and in front of Jak and Krysty, were twenty-seven other prisoners. Their captors had passed a rope through their ankle shackles, so individuals couldn’t break ranks and commit suicide by jumping overboard, and thereby avoid being worked to death. J.B. and the others circled around the main deck in a drunken conga line, marching to the beat of the Matachìn coxswain, who sat on a canvas folding chair on the stern. The hood of the pirate’s plastic poncho shadowed his face as he pounded on a steel drum with a pair of rag-wrapped hammers.

  The rest of the galley slave contingent, sixty souls in all, continued to row in unison under cover of metal, pipe-strut-support
ed awnings that bracketed the port and starboard rails from amidships to stern. Among the chained rowers were Ryan Cawdor, Dr. Mildred Wyeth and Doc Tanner, who watched from behind their long oars as J.B., Jak and Krysty rounded the rear of the superstructure and stumbled across the heaving deck.

  It was leg-stretching time for one-third of the conscripted crew.

  Every couple of hours the Matachìn pulled one person off each of the thirty benches, leaving the remainder to row. The pirates forced the chosen to circumnavigate the tug’s deck at least a dozen times, no matter the weather or sea state—a regimen J.B. figured had come from years of trial and error. Regular stretching was essential to keep slaves in proper working condition; it prevented debilitating muscle cramps and tears. The object was to wring the most out of the rowers before flinging their spent, skeletal carcasses over the side into the Lantic.

  The yawing of the tug caused the horizon to leap and fall wildly, making its two sister ships abruptly vanish and reappear astern. Despite the rain, despite the violent motion, J.B. was grateful for the opportunity to move around. Sitting for hours, pulling at the oars, knotted his back and thigh muscles. The constant ache in his cracked but healing ribs had diminished. The pain still peaked every time he took too deep a breath.

  They had been rowing the pirates’ massive, oceangoing tugboat for three weeks, give or take; three weeks since the fall of Padre Island and the Nuevo-Texican defeat. After the first week, it had become impossible to separate one day from the next—such was the monotony of crushing, mindless toil.

  Rounding the stern, J.B. faced into the wind and the wet. Sideways-blown raindrops spattered the lenses of his spectacles, partially obscuring his vision. He brushed away the drops with rag-bandaged, manacled hands. Dead ahead was a towering gray cloud that drifted alone like a monumental ship of the air. Its crest loomed high above them, hundreds of feet up into the grim sky, from its bottom edge hung a darker gray, ever-shifting veil. Where veil met sea, the water was pitch-black and boiling from concentrated, torrential rain.

  Steadily, inexorably, they were pulling for the very heart of the squall.

  A gruff voice crackled through the tug’s loud-hailer.

  The command was unintelligible gibberish to J.B., but the poncho-clad, Matachìn deck-watch immediately opened a hatch in the stern and started passing out five-gallon plastic buckets to the captives.

  Empty bucket at his feet, J.B. once again glanced over at Krysty and Jak. His longtime companions were shadows of their former selves. Krysty’s prehensile hair hung down around her shoulders in drenched, lifeless ribbons; her hip bones protruded alarmingly. Jak’s dead-white but youthful face had aged: it had become drawn and gaunt. His weather-cracked lips were flecked with dried blood; his ruby-colored eyes had sunk in their sockets, and they burned with a fevered intensity. Standing beside them was the blond Padre Islander boy, Garwood Reed, the same brave, defiant Deathlands fourteen-year-old who’d tried to lead the companions to safety during the assault on the grounded freighter. The pirates had transformed the youngest of their surviving captives into a stick figure with eyes rimmed by dark circles.

  J.B. was in as bad a physical state as they were. He had lost a lot of weight, too. Half his teeth were loose, his gums bled, his hands were blistered and split. His mind wasn’t right, either. He was having more and more difficulty concentrating, his thoughts continually plunging into a pit of self-directed anger. Even though they had been betrayed in the final moment by that shitweasel Daniel Desipio, a fire talker, he still blamed himself for the capture of his comrades, and for this gruesome outcome.

  Even though the galley slaves were fed morning and night, they were wasting away; it was inevitable, a matter of calories burned versus calories taken in. Their morning meal was a ladleful of gummy, weevily corn porridge mixed with molasses. The evening meal was the same gruel sprinkled with flaked salt-dried fish—bones, guts and all. Their food was boiled to mush in a caldron on the stern deck.

  Chained to their oars, J.B. and the others ate hog slop while their pirate captors feasted inside the ship’s main cabin. Fragrant spice and meat smells drifted out from the galley. Chilis. Cumin. Garlic. Beans. Rice. Slow-roasted pork. Deep-fried, freshly caught fish. The aromas made J.B.’s stomach rumble and his mouth water. Food had some kind of special significance for the stinking bastards.

  Holy moley significance.

  Their off-key singing and rhythmic chanting at meals never failed to set his nerves on edge. The pirates’ religion was as incomprehensible and hateful to J.B. as their gobbledygook language.

  Even though the Matachìn deck-watch was outnumbered ten to one, they turned their backs on the captives as they handed out the plastic buckets. It wasn’t negligence. It was confidence born of experience and training. The pirates knew the limits of their slaves, both physical and psychological. The captives were always chained to the rowing benches or linked together at the ankles; their wrists were cuffed. Overpowering the guards would require all thirty moving as one, an impossible feat, and not just because of the restraints. Fear of the consequences of failure—either lashings of the whip or agonizing death by machete chops—ensured that most of the prisoners would remain immobile during an attack; their deadweight doomed any mutiny attempt from the start.

  As far as J.B. was concerned, the Matachìn weren’t just foreign fighters, they were aliens from another world.

  After three weeks without a bath, J.B. knew he didn’t smell so great himself, but the rank, eye-watering pong of his overseers forced him to breathe through his mouth whenever they stood upwind. Pillaged feminine jewelry—delicate golden bracelets and necklaces—glittered around their boot tops and peeked out from behind the masses of waist-length, moldy dreadlocks. Some of them wore the torn, blood-stained dresses of their victims over the outside of their clothes. Gut-hook machetes, the standard-issue cutting weapon, hung in canvas scabbards on their hips.

  The pirates carried stubby submachine guns, of a design the Armorer had never seen. The blasters had an M-16 type plastic carrying handle/rear sight and a smooth, fixed rear plastic stock. A ventilated plastic front stock/shroud concealed an eight-inch barrel. The bore looked to be 9 mm. The 30-round curved mag was also made of the same high-strength plastic.

  During the one-sided battle for Padre Island, the Matachìn had worn mass-produced body armor, something unheard-of in the hellscape. The trauma plate had stopped Krysty’s .38 rounds cold. J.B. had seen that with his own eyes.

  The seven-ship raiding party had voyaged a great distance and without breaking a sweat had obliterated at least two heavily fortified outposts on the Gulf coast, Padre Island and Matamoros ville. They had taken the few survivors—including J.B. and the others—as replacement galley slaves. Inexplicably, the Matachìn hadn’t bothered to loot Padre’s beached container ship, which was full of what J.B. and his companions deemed irreplaceable predark spoils; they’d just let it burn.

  Up until a month ago, up until a week before his enslavement, J.B. had given little consideration to the wider world outside Deathlands. There had been no reason for him to consider it. The daily battle for food, shelter and safety was a grindstone difficult to see over. And on top of that, making do in the hellscape was something J.B. excelled at and took justifiable pride in.

  Though nuclear Armageddon was more than a century in the past, Deathlands had not yet recovered in any meaningful way. There was still no manufacturing to speak of, large or small. Its norm population remained primitively agrarian: hand-cultivated crops were supplemented by seasonal hunting and gathering. Vast areas were made uninhabitable by lingering high levels of radiation from overlapping Soviet MIRV strikes. Travel over any distance was risky because of roaming bands of savage chiller-muties. A ruined road system and a lack of surplus goods limited the possibilities for expansion of trade.

  The existing social organization lay in the hands of the barons, self-proclaimed royalty who controlled their fiefdoms with small, relatively well-equipped
armies of sec men. The barons’ territories were bounded by easily defensible topographic features: mountains, plateaus, river channels and the like. Because mass communication was nonexistent and individual human settlements so scattered, there was no way to accurately estimate Deathlands survivors, but it was certainly a tiny fraction of the 200 million before skydark. The overall numbers were so reduced and the land area so enormous that wider conquest—or national reunification—by any one of the barons, or an association of same, was simply out of the question.

  For more than a hundred years the barons’ winning strategy had been to hunker down and hold ground.

  J.B. wasn’t incurious or closed-minded about the outside world—like most other born-and-bred Deathlanders he was simply dismissive of it. If the United States of America, the most powerful country to ever exist on the face of the earth, couldn’t rebuild itself after the nukecaust, then how could the considerably less well-off nations to the south?

  A month earlier, while still free, he and his companions had been forced to consider an alternate view.

  Beyond the southeastern edge of the Houston nuke-a-thon, in Port Arthur ville they had joined forces with a seagoing trader of renowned skill and legendary savagery. Harmonica Tom Wolf had opened their eyes to the possibility that the basic assumption—that Deathlands was the sole nexus and the pinnacle of human survival and culture—might be 180-degrees wrong.

  By the skin of his teeth, Harmonica Tom had escaped capture at Padre Island on his forty-foot sloop, Tempest. The companions might have made it to safety, too, if J.B.’s rib injury hadn’t held them back. That he had been the crew’s weak link, that his infirmity had brought them to such a fate, stuck deep in the Armorer’s craw.