Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) Read online

  He said something in his native garble talk that made the others laugh.

  Krysty didn’t look down at his protruding manhood. She stared him straight in the weird eye. Her gaze didn’t drop to the target until his filthy fingers actually touched her skin. The designated target wasn’t his exposed crotch; it was five inches below the point of his dirty chin.

  When he touched her, it triggered an automatic explosion of movement.

  Precise.

  Lethal.

  Krysty’s right arm shot upward as her legs drove down into the sand. With every ounce of Gaia strength behind it, she thrust her stiffened fingers into the front of his exposed throat. Like a battering ram, her arm didn’t flex. Nor did her wrist. Her strike hand was rigid as stone as it plunged into his windpipe. The box of cartillage crunched under her fingertips. She felt it crush to bits against the front of his spine.

  One blow.

  One stunning blow.

  Soundlessly the pirate slipped to his knees, clutching at his throat with both hands. His mouth opened and closed, but no sound emerged. Nothing went in, either. His airway was sealed shut by the massive trauma. Confidence gone, there was panic in eyes shot with blood, bulging as if about to pop from their sockets. The pirate’s face turned red under the brown, then purple, then black.

  He slumped to his side and died horribly, kicking his legs as he helplessly strangled. He died without emitting so much as a peep.

  His fellow pirates rushed over and tried to help, but there was nothing they could do for him. A tracheotomy was beyond their physiological knowledge and medical skill.

  At the end, in his last spasm, he fouled himself so badly even his pirate friends had to back away.

  The massive expenditure of force left Krysty completely exhausted, as weak as a baby. It was always like that immediately afterward, but this time the strength left her more abruptly than usual. She couldn’t repeat the trick without recuperating.

  She had hoped a demonstration on one of their kind would make the others rethink their plans for amusement.

  It didn’t.

  They jumped his corpse and gang-rushed her from all sides, easily pulling her down to the sand on her back. She tried to fight them, but was so drained of strength she couldn’t push them off. When they had her securely pinned, they began pulling up her shirt and hauling her jeans down around her knees. She felt air and sun and sand on her nether parts.

  “¡Pubis roja!” one of them howled in delight.

  “¡Jugoso!” declared another.

  “Krysty, what the fuck is going on?” Ryan said, trying to rise to his feet only to be pushed down with the gun muzzle.

  How was she supposed to tell her lover that she was about to be raped to death while he knelt helpless not thirty feet away?

  Before they could get her boots off and pull her pants off over them to spread her legs, High Pile intervened. He stopped the gang rape with a few well-chosen words.

  Enano something, Krysty thought he said. What it meant, she had no clue. That it worked was all that mattered.

  The pirates backed away from her, shaking their heads in disappointment as they stuffed themselves back in their flies.

  Krysty tugged down her shirt and pulled up her pants. She redid the buttons with difficulty, her fingers were trembling that hard.

  She looked to High Pile to convey thanks, but he wasn’t paying any attention to her. He barked another order, and his underlings scurried to obey.

  A gunny sack was tossed onto the sand. It landed with the clank of metal. Heavy metal. The pirates dumped out the contents: chains and shackles. Before the others could recover, their ankles were cuffed. A short length of chain connected the shackles, making it impossible to run. After similar manacles were clapped on their wrists, chains were connected between wrists and ankles, so the captives couldn’t swing a blow.

  Krysty was shackled in exactly the same fashion.

  And when they were all suitably trussed as individuals, a long length of chain was passed through loops in their ankle cuffs, linking them together.

  The pirates jerked and kicked them to their feet. Then they were marched back up the dune, back toward the freighter.

  Ryan, Jak, Mildred, Doc, J.B. and Garwood still couldn’t see. Tears still streamed down their faces. Their eyelids were almost swollen shut. They were still racked with spasms of coughing.

  The new slaves were made to file past High Pile and Daniel Desipio.

  As she passed Daniel, Krysty hawked and with a last smidgeon of Gaia power spit square in his face.

  The impact made his head snap back.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Harmonica Tom watched as the two fastest pursuit ships continued to close on his stern. He knew he was getting everything there was to get out of Tempest. There was no doubt in his mind that in a fair race between the three, he would come in dead last. If he did nothing, the pirates would bracket him in the open water, bring their grappling hooks to bear and swing aboard in droves.

  Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Tom cut the helm over to starboard, steering for the mainland shore. He knew the shoals around Padre; he was pretty sure they didn’t. Even if they did, it was the only card he had to play.

  Holding course with his left hand, he opened the backpack of C-4. He dumped out a couple of bricks onto the cockpit’s bench seat, then picked out a remote detonator. Leaning against the wheel, working on the cabin top in front of it, he ran a power check on the remote, making sure it lit up. Setting it aside, he rigged four pounds of high explosive in two chunks.

  He wasn’t sure yet how he was going to use the plastique. Mebbe he would wait until the pirates got closer and then lob the armed bricks onto the respective decks. Mebbe if things really went downhill, if he got boarded, he’d blow up Tempest himself and two pirate ships along with it.

  Blasterfire from behind, angling in from both ships, rattled the stays. It forced him to duck momentarily. When he popped back up, he dead-reckoned a line that ran from the northwest tip of Padre with a dip in the bluff along the mainland shore. Then he checked his compass reading in case enemy blasterfire made taking a line of sight a dicey proposition at the last minute.

  If he missed the gap in the shoal, if the sandbar had shifted more than ten yards in either direction since the last time he was here, it was going to be all over for him in a big hurry.

  If he made it through, he had a fighting chance.

  The pursuit continued to gain on him. At the rate they were traveling, they would be side by side with him as he hit the slot.

  He had one more trick up his sleeve.

  He was still running with engine as well as sails to squeeze the most speed out of his ship. As the shoal came up fast, Tom pulled the motor into neutral.

  Tempest slowed sickeningly.

  The pursuit seemed to leap forward.

  The pirates were so preoccupied with coming alongside, that they didn’t see the color change rushing up at them. From emerald green to lime green.

  The ship on the starboard side hit the sandbar at what had to be fifteen knots. The keel instantly grounded, the bow pointed up at a sixty-degree angle. The vessel stopped so short that the forward momentum cracked off its main mast at the deck. Undoubtedly it had been weakened by his last burst of machine-gun fire. As the mast and its sheets toppled over into the water, Tom let out a whoop and dropped the motor back in gear.

  The other ship cut speed, veered in behind him and followed him through the slot. As they shot through the gap, the distance between them was about twenty feet.

  Another hump of sand was coming up fast. As Tom tried to bring Tempest to port, the ship slowed a little, and the pursuer, keeping a straight course, sped up and joined. For an instant they were pressed hull to hull. Fiberglass squeaking against fiberglass.

  Tom watched in astonishment and fury as the pirates waiting in the bow jumped from their boat to his. No grappling hooks. No lines. They just jumped,
landing with loud thuds on his foredeck.

  Then the pirate ship stopped dead as it, too, ran aground. Men in the cockpit were thrown up into the sheets, into the booms, thrown overboard. The vessel was stuck good, but it didn’t lose its masts.

  Tom popped his head up over the cabin roof and saw four men on his foredeck. They were unslinging submachine guns and taking cover in front of the cabin. A glance over his shoulder told him that the two remaining pursuers were following in his wake at a discreet distance. He slipped a loop of line over the wheel to hold course, then drew his handblaster.

  Tom rolled out of the portside of the cockpit, and came up against the rail in a shooting crouch. One of the pirates angled around the front corner of the cabin, trying to get a bead on him with his submachine gun. Before he could touch off a round, the big wheelgun barked and bucked.

  A hole opened up in the front of the guy’s throat, as chunks of flesh and blood blew out the back. The pirate flopped under the rail, his head hanging down loose at an unnatural angle, like a broken doll. Then as the ship hit a line of chop, the body slipped over the side.

  Tom caught another movement at the corner of the cabin and fired again. The pirate ducked back, but not quickly enough.

  The .45 slug took off half his head, dreads and all.

  Sensing that they were losing their advantage, the remaining two pirates rose in unison and sent autofire streaming his way. Then they charged the starboard rail, still firing, trying to pin him down in the stern. As the ship hit the chop of the Gulf, it porpoised and rolled, making it hard for them to keep their balance and stay on target.

  Tom jumped back in cockpit and swung the rudder over hard. The main boom swung in the opposite direction, sweeping across the deck and knocking one of the boarders into the water. The sound the boom made against his head was hollow like hammer hitting a coconut. The impact left a smear of blood on the sail.

  The last pirate wasn’t going to give up. He resumed the attack, rushing down the rail while he fired from the hip.

  He ran out of ammo amidships.

  Tom popped up from behind the cabin and had him flat-footed, dead in the water.

  Grinning maniacally, the pirate dropped the empty blaster and reached behind his back for another clip.

  Tom cocked back the Smith’s hammer, single action.

  The pirate held up the full mag, showing it to Tom, as though he thought the captain wouldn’t blast him. Or maybe he didn’t care.

  Instead of shooting him in the heart, the skipper lowered his aimpoint and put a .45 round through his right knee.

  The leg gave way at once and the pirate hit the deck, no longer smiling. His leg half blown off, he was screaming like a baby. High and shrill.

  “There, there now,” Tom said as he holstered his weapon. “Let me fix that for you.”

  He climbed over the cabin and came around behind the pirate. Without a word, he looped a line around the man’s neck, cinched a quick knot, then used a pulley to jerk him up the main mast, hanging him from the yardarm.

  The pirate stood on the tiptoe of his good leg, able to keep from strangling only if he maintained his balance.

  Tom tied off the line on a cleat, leaving the man to toe dance, then checked the other body for signs of life. Finding none, he dragged the head-shot corpse to the stern.

  As he did, he talked to the toe dancer, not giving a good goddamn if he was understood. “You dirty bastards chilled a bunch of friends of mine,” he said. “You chilled them in awful ways.”

  Looking back toward the stern, he saw that one of the pursuit ships had stopped to pick up the bodies of the two pirates overboard, the throat-shot one and the boom-busted one. Just like off the beach at Padre, the Matachìn were recovering their dead.

  It gave Tom an idea.

  The other ship kept coming, and it was gaining fast.

  “Know what that gets you?” Tom asked the toe dancer. “Chilling my friends?”

  The pirate had no clue. His neck was stretched to its limit, the rope creaking under the suspended weight.

  “It gets you fucked by Harmonica Tom.”

  With that, the skipper of Tempest flipped up the cockpit seat cushion and dug out a pair of bright orange lifejackets. Wrestling the corpse with half a head onto its side, he got the limp arms through the lifejacket holes, then rolled the body onto its back. He laid one of the blocks of C-4 on the chest, then folded over the front panels and cinched the binding straps up extra tight.

  Tom returned to the mast, uncleated the end of the line connected to the other pirate and hauled on it hard, yanking the guy off his tippy toes. After a minute or so of letting him dangle, when he stopped kicking his good leg and his face went deep purple, Tom lowered him to the deck.

  He put the other lifejacket on the unconscious man. This time he stuffed the brick of C-4 into the back of it, where the pirate couldn’t get at it, then he really bore down on the binding tapes.

  After dragging him to the stern, he threw some water in his face to wake him up. When the pirate blinked at him, Tom tipped him over the side. He did the same with the dead guy.

  Tempest sailed on, leaving two men in lifejackets bobbing in its wake.

  One of the floaters was conscious enough to wave an arm at the oncoming pursuit ship.

  Tom knew the guy wasn’t waving to be picked up; he was trying desperately to wave off his pirate kin.

  But they didn’t know that.

  The skipper took out his harmonica, and tapping his foot, started up a lively tune, a kick-up-your-heels-and-dance kind of tune.

  Sure enough, the ship closing in on him dropped sail and slowed to pick up the wounded and the dead. The fourth ship was coming up on it from behind, trying to reengage the pursuit.

  When the lead ship stopped alongside the floating men, Tom put down his harmonica, armed the detonator and, pointing it over the stern, hit the little red button.

  With a tremendous flash and boom, a water spout shot into the sky. Along with it went half the ship’s port side. The plume of debris was spectacular.

  “Whoo-wee!” Tom exclaimed.

  Stuff blown skyward rained down all around the stricken craft, splashing in a wide circle. All of a sudden there were a lot more corpses and parts thereof for the pirates to recover.

  As water flooded into the breached side of hull, the ship immediately began to tilt in that direction, the masts angling lower and lower until they touched the water.

  The fourth and last ship approached the wreck cautiously, just in case there were more explosives.

  The chase had ended.

  And ended badly for the Matachìn.

  With the pressure off, Tom indulged himself. He laughed and hooted and danced an ungainly jig accompanied by himself on the harmonica.

  The moment of triumph passed and the skipper of Tempest was left with lingering doubts. Serious doubts. Was what he had just done enough? Did it balance the books? After all, the pirates had murdered a couple hundred people. They had brought down one of the hellscape’s living legends, Ryan Cawdor.

  On its face it hardly seemed like tit for tat.

  Did there have to be more? If so, how much more? Did the payback have to be times ten, times twenty?

  He still had a shitload of C-4 that could be put to use. What good was jack when it had the blood of so many good people on it?

  It was something he would have to contemplate.

  Tom cut his engine and let the wind take his ship southwest, then scooped a bucket of seawater to sluice the residue of brains and skull off his foredeck.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  On the beach below the Yoko Maru, the new slaves awaited their masters’ pleasure. Ryan could see again, as could his companions and the islander boy, Garwood. His eye still burned, still teared a little, but he could see, and he was aware of the totality of their predicament. The situation was beyond desperate.

  Disarmed.

  Chained.

  Held at blasterpoint.
/>   Prisoners all, but to what end? He knew nothing about the pirates, except they were triple brutal, didn’t seem to speak English and packed some impressive weaponry. They had slaughtered an entire ville for what? Not for its material wealth. Most of that had burned in the shantytown or was still burning in the grounded freighter. They had made no attempt to put out the fires or to secure the goods that hadn’t been destroyed.

  They didn’t seem to give a damn about any of it. About any of the things that the people of the hellscape would’ve gladly chilled for.

  It was something that really worried Ryan. As long as their motives were unknown, their future actions couldn’t be anticipated.

  He was furious at himself for letting Daniel live. He should have chilled him when they first boarded the freighter. But he’d had no way of knowing he was in league with the Matachìn.

  Standing behind the pirate with the tallest pile of dreads, Daniel looked like a pet that was barely tolerated, a creature used to receiving the back of a hand on a whim. Cowed. Cringing. Servile. That’s one reason Ryan figured he was harmless. Despicable but harmless.

  Wrong.

  The nature of the pirate–Daniel Desipio relationship was as unclear as everything else. What had he been doing on the island? Scouting it out for the attack? That didn’t seem likely. There was no way for him to pass information he had gathered to the pirates. Not without leaving the place. It was too isolated. And if he had left Padre Island to deliver his scouting report, why had he come back? There would have been no reason to do that.

  “We almost made it,” Krysty said. “If it hadn’t been for that smarmy little bastard, we would have. We were that close.”

  “At least Tom got away,” Ryan said.

  “He turned his back on us,” the redhead said. “He ran off with his ship and left us for dead.”

  “He didn’t owe us anything,” Ryan countered. “There was nothing he could do. And he had the right to save himself.”

  “Would we have left him like that?”

  “If the situation was reversed, I’d say yes. In a heartbeat.”