Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1)

  “This could change all our lives for the better,” Mildred said.

  “If there’s another world out there, an unnuked world, maybe we wouldn’t want to come back.”

  “Mebbe you wouldn’t want to come back,” Krysty said.

  “If you’ve got big love in your heart for Deathlands because you were born here, that’s your business,” Mildred told her. “From what I’ve seen, I’d say all the hellscape does is kick our asses.”

  “And what if the captain isn’t telling us the whole truth?” Krysty said.

  “A guy doesn’t survive solo without having some neat tricks up his sleeve,” J.B. said with confidence.

  Ryan held up his hands. “It’s about the devil we know versus the devil we don’t. The familiar, bad as it is, is still familiar. We can pretty much reckon how we’re gonna die. Starvation. Thirst. Gutshot. Ate by some mutie. I don’t particularly care where I croak or how.”

  “So you’re for taking this pipe-dream trip and mebbe never coming back?” Krysty said, aghast.

  Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

  Latitude Zero

  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

  JAMES AXLER

  DEATH LANDS®

  Plague Lords

  I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.

  —The Holy Bible,

  Book of Daniel

  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

  Prologue

  When a mosquito speared Okie Moore right between the eyes, he deftly squashed it against his forehead. Blood from the bug’s crushed abdomen trickled in a cool bead down the side of his nose. He wiped it across his cheek with the back of his hand, smearing a fresh daub of red into the impasto of squashed bodies, legs, wings—tiny gobs of black mush trapped in the hairs of his beard. A cloud of bugs wheeled around his head; mosquitos broke formation and dive-bombed him in waves, trying to get at his earlobes, but they were protected by his greasy, shoulder-length hair.

  Okie ignored the shrill, singsong whine and concentrated on the Fire Talker’s rapid flow of words and exaggerated gestures. They were the evening’s featured entertainment. The young ’uns squatting in the sand next to him moved a dozen steps to the right, into the shifting river of smoke that poured off the communal bonfire—the skeeter No Fly Zone.

  The air this particular evening was heavy with bugs and moisture, that and the smothering heat made deep breathing difficult. Circled around the campfire were more than two hundred filthy people in brand-new, matching clothing. The men, women and older children wore baggy, gaudy Hawaiian-style shirts and shorts, still creased from the packaging, and gleaming white high-top basketball shoes. The toe boxes of the women’s and kids’ shoes were crammed with rags to make them fit. They looked like a band of homeless who had just looted a Wal-Mart summer clearance sale, or a gathering of Jimmy Buffett impersonators.

  These Deathlanders weren’t homeless, though, and they weren’t defenseless. Well-oiled AKMs, semi-auto pistols, slide-action shotguns and heavy machine guns all stood close to hand, shoulder slung or holstered, or tripod swivel-mounted to spray 180 degrees of water approach with predark alloys of lead.

  The price of sitting on a gold mine was eternal vigilance.

&n
bsp; And the gold mine in question was above ground and visible for miles in all directions.

  In the furious aftermath of Armageddon, the Yoko Maru, a container ship loaded with substandard, U.S. market-reject merchandise bound for Brazil, had been driven high and dry onto the shoal of Padre Island. The narrow slip of Padre, once two hundred miles long, had been crosscut by category 7 storms into a chain of hundreds of smaller landmasses and barely submerged sandy reefs. The little landmass that Okie and his clan shared with the Yoko Maru stood directly opposite the entrance to Corpus Christi Bay, which had expanded to drown the low-lying Texas port community of the same name. Tidal waves had swept away the pillars and roadway of JFK Causeway Bridge that once connected Padre to the mainland. Postnukecaust, the only access to the island was by boat.

  “And then the Vikings jumped in their time dilator and took their war to Mars,” the Fire Talker announced with a dramatic, skyward sweep of his arm. A camouflage survivalist do-rag encircled the itinerant storyteller’s head, layers of duct tape held together his lace-up, Nam-surplus boots. He wore a camouflage hunting vest with overstuffed pockets and no shirt underneath, and a pair of hacked-off, holed-out, olive-drab BDU pants for shorts. “They’re the ones who made the stickies and scalies, the talking lungfish and the celery people,” the entertainer told the audience, his voice rising in pitch and excitement. “It was part of their ancient Norse magic, what they call the Rune Stone Concatenation. And their minions launched a devastating counterattack against the Iroquois Ninja princess’s cloud operatives…”

  “For nuke’s sake, get to the fucking point,” someone from the far side of the ring growled.

  Grumbles and hisses chimed from all sides. The Nuevo-Texicans, many of whom were sitting in injection-molded, white plastic lawn chairs, were getting more and more restless.

  “What about the Matachìn?” someone else prompted. “That’s what we want to hear about.”

  “I’m coming to them,” the Fire Talker replied. “Patience, my friends, patience. Past is prologue. It’s important you’re brought up to speed on the real background of recent events…”

  Okie noted the halfhearted way this stranger fanned at the swirling mass of skeeters circling his head and shoulders. He didn’t squash a single one, nor did he manage to dislodge the legions feeding on his bare arms and shoulders and speckling his uncovered legs.

  The Fire Talker bore vague resemblance to a picture Okie and the others had seen before. It had been stuck inside ten thousand, thin, clear plastic cases they’d found in one of the Yoko Maru’s cargo containers. The predark image was of a brilliantly smiling, blockheaded guy with a dark stubbly beard and eyelashes that were way too long and lush. George Mackerel? Or was it Mackerel George? Okie couldn’t recall. No one on Padre Island had had a clue what the golden disks inside the cases were for. The island’s kids had torn open the cases and used the disks as flying toys. The litter of picture inserts had long since vanished, turned to pulp by torrential rain and washed out to sea. The CDs were still in evidence, stomped to golden bits and scattered through the sand.

  Even from a distance, their twenty-acre, windswept island home looked like a garbage dump; downwind it smelled like one. Mounded debris—paper, plastic, wood and metal—smothered the remnants of dunes and dune grasses. All that was missing from the landfill were flocks of seagulls. With the local shortage of fresh meat, roasted gull made a nice change from fish and the other main staple, rat on a stick. Following their noses, the rats kept swimming back across the channel, but the birds weren’t that stupid. Despite the complex and alluring aromas, they rarely overflew the island anymore, and those that did paid dearly for the mistake.

  Thirty years before, the first families had caught a glimpse of the grounded ship from the mainland shore. Well-armed and well-provisioned, they had walked the Gulf coastline, up from below the former international border. These offspring of some of the very last Americans, saved from incineration by their Mexican expatriation, had come north to take stock of their squandered inheritance. The original Nuevo-Texicans weren’t patriots. They were scroungers, looking for booty, spoils, something weakly defended to steal, and they had stumbled upon a prize so big they couldn’t shift it, not in a dozen lifetimes, so they had simply moved in.

  The Yoko Maru and its bounty had sat rusting and unmolested for seventy years because of ignorance and fear, the twinned lodestones of the reshaped planet. Vast sections of the Gulf Coast were rumored to be so nuke-poisoned as to be impassable. To just set foot there was certain death. That was myth, as the Nuevo-Texicans had soon discovered.

  The people of the postnukecaust world knew even less about radiation effects than their progenitors, who didn’t know very much, either, even though mortality data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was widely available before the arsenal-emptying U.S.-Soviet exchange. Common wisdom posited a quick, horrible demise from radiation overdose when in fact, lethality depended entirely on intensity and exposure time: in the case of Hiroshima victims who weren’t killed in the initial blast and who survived their burns, it had taken twenty-five or thirty years for the damage to fully manifest.

  In Deathlands, the odds over a quarter century were infinitely better that something or someone was going to beat rad cancer to the punch.

  One of the “somethings” in play were the muties—deadly new creatures that had crawled out of the Apocalyptic ooze to plague and slaughter the vestiges of humankind. Again in error, the survivors blamed this spreading terror on the effects of radiation. Whatever had really come to pass when civilization ended, however the cage doors to hell had been opened, the information necessary to understand it had been lost. And even if it hadn’t been, the struggling humans lacked the ability and inclination to interpret it. In point of fact, the Apocalypse had tainted the invisible genetic material of every living thing: post-nukeday, there were no “norms,” just degrees of mutie. That was an impossible pill for the human survivors to swallow. They had been pitched into a frightening, altered landscape where safety and survival were hard-won, and could be lost in the next instant.

  For those reasons, humanity had kept its head squarely between its knees for generations.

  News along the ruined Atlantic and Gulf coasts was fragmentary and transmitted by word of mouth from passing traders and wandering storytellers. These infrequent campfire soliloquies were the only entertainment on offer. The Fire Talkers swapped their tales for grub, joy juice and the gratis services of gaudy sluts. On Padre, guest speakers who failed to sufficiently amuse faced a long, almost always fatal, forced swim back to the mainland.

  “Cloud operatives are pulling all the strings from their base behind the moon,” the survivalist raconteur asserted.

  And was immediately challenged on the facts.

  “But you just said they were pawns!” a graybeard on the far side of the ring called out.

  “No, I said they might be pawns,” the Fire Talker countered, flashing his startlingly white teeth. “Obviously, there’s a big difference.”

  “You didn’t say might,” the graybeard scoffed.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t,” the woman sitting beside the graybeard countered.

  “What an asshole,” someone catcalled.

  Okie had had enough of the tap-dancing, too. Stepping forward, he thrust a grimy finger in the Fire Talker’s face. “Isabel ville, Browns ville, Mata-fuckin’-moros ville,” he thundered. “Tell us about something real, Mr. Mackerel George, or you’re goin’ skinny-dippin’ with sharks.”

  As if a dam of tension had burst, Okie’s threat brought forth braying laughter, whistles, hoots and applause.

  The Padre islanders had good cause to be on edge. According to stories that had recently filtered up the Gulf shore, seafaring invaders were ransacking the villes to the south. Known as the Matachìn, they were animalistic butchers and murderers, pirate scum. If the tales were accurate, they had already raided the remnants of the biggest coastal cities of eastern
Mexico, towns that had fared much better postnukeday than those in the American Southwest. According to rumor, Veracruz, Tampico and Cancun still existed, albeit much diminished in size and population. The Fire Talker claimed to have come from that direction, and to have eye-witnessed the recent pillaging; that’s the only reason they had ferried him across the water, that’s why they had fed and liquored him up at their own expense.

  Okie and the others weren’t concerned about raiders from the north. The flooded, nuked-out wasteland that was the Texas shore served as a barrier to the East Coast barons’ desire for expansion. And the barons had enough trouble, anyway, defending the territory they already controlled. Armies sent off to new conquests left homelands unprotected. There were no navies worthy of the name, just a handful of intrepid traders working out of small, wind-powered boats.

  The Fire Talker flashed Okie a big, pearly toothed grin and said, “The Matachìn attacked Browns ville and Matamoros ville nine days ago.”

  This news was met with gasps and groans.

  Browns ville was just 160 miles to the south.

  “They came in a fleet of tugboats, half a dozen at least,” the storyteller went on. “Motored top speed right up the mouth of the Grandee.”

  “They were under engine power?” Okie said in disbelief.

  An assault like that called for diesel in the tens of thousands of gallons. An unheard-of, even mythic quantity of fuel.

  “Engine and Viking power,” the Fire Talker replied. “Stacks pumping out dark brown smoke in broad daylight, horns wailing, firing cannons mounted fore and aft. Their allies, the Vikings, manipulated the virtual time continuum along the meridian lines, the power grids of Earth’s magnetic core, and turned the sky black and the sea red. Just imagine the ville folks’ fear. Imagine their horror when the darkness and death fell upon them.