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  So far, so good, Ryan thought. Even though it was broad daylight, no one had noticed their penetration. He knew that wouldn’t last.

  As the three of them cut across the swathe of open ground toward the two-story cell blocks, someone started shouting at them.

  Still there was no armed response. Perhaps because this incursion into the heart of Xibalba was entirely unexpected and unprecedented.

  That all changed when four bald-headed pirates suddenly rounded the corner of the cell block, running with weapons up. Chucho and Ryan fired first, at a distance of about eight yards, aiming center chest. The silenced, full-auto bursts blasted the Matachìn off their feet. As they were flung aside, they fired their submachine guns into the air and the ground in front of them.

  So much for surprise.

  The Xibalban bystanders scattered as Ryan, Chucho and Tom charged around the corner, heading for the rear of the whitecoat building. They didn’t have enough time or enough ammo to take out everyone in sight. Just the combatants. The ones who stood in their way.

  Ryan hit the doors first. He burst into a foyer that opened onto a low-ceilinged reception area. A handful of whitecoats stood there, stunned for an instant, then they all dived for cover.

  “Krysty, Mildred!” Ryan bellowed down the corridor. “J.B., Doc, Jak! Where are you?”

  When there was no answer, he growled at Tom and Chucho, “Let’s start kicking in some doors.”

  Ryan found Jak in the second room he tried. The albino was strapped and gagged on a table. Released, he was spitting mad. Not a pretty sight with those bloodred eyes and deathly pale face and hair. He looked like a demon ghost.

  Ryan handed him the submachine gun and swung the big Russian MG around on its shoulder sling.

  “Fuck ’em up!” Jak snarled. “Let’s fuck ’em up!”

  Out in the hallway, Tom and Chucho had found and freed the others. When Krysty saw Ryan she ran toward him full-tilt, threw herself into his open arms and squeezed him tight. Her emerald eyes shining with tears, she said, “Oh, lover! Oh, Gaia, thank you, thank you!”

  “You are a sight for sore eyes, my dear Ryan,” Doc said as he stepped up.

  “And we’re seeing double,” Mildred added, nodding at Chucho.

  There was no time to get acquainted, or reacquainted. And definitely no time for explanations.

  Harmonica Tom opened Ryan’s backpack, reached in and took out a pre-rigged block of C-4. “Where is this going to do the most damage?” he said, hefting the oblong parcel in his hand.

  Mildred pointed toward the quarantine section. “That’s where they keep the enanos and the plague serum,” she told him. “It’s a triple layer of containment, pressure sealed so the disease can’t accidentally get out. Once that’s gone they’ll never be able to rebuild it. Or make more plague carriers.”

  “If we blow it up, won’t we be releasing it?” Krysty said.

  “The heat of the explosion will probably destroy it,” Mildred said.

  “And even if it doesn’t,” Ryan added, “it’ll be contained on the island. We’re fifty miles from the mainland. When we leave, we’re turning the lights out.”

  Ryan took Tom’s H&K and handed it to J.B. There weren’t enough extra weapons to go around. After Tom planted the charge, Ryan said, “Now, let’s go pay a visit to the Lords of Death.”

  “They’re probably all holed up in the gym building. Its their council place,” Mildred said. “It’s where they hold audiences with their toadies. They’ve got big-time backup in there.”

  As they exited the research center, bullets slammed into the concrete facade and skipped off the concrete walkway. They were moving too quickly to see where the blasterfire was coming from, and it didn’t matter at that point; their goal was to reach the next bit of solid cover, which was the near wall of the gymnasium.

  They ran past assorted sniveling wretches and pus bags who although still smiling to beat the band were wandering around in a daze, not understanding what had happened, or what was about to happen.

  “Doors in, doors out?” Ryan asked Mildred.

  “Two doors, one at either end,” she said. “There are no other ways out.”

  “If they’re in there, we’ve got ’em,” Tom said.

  Ryan sent Jak off to the right with extra mags for the H&K, to cover the gym’s rear exit and forestall a retreat in that direction. Then he and the others ran for the building’s main entrance. As they came around the corner, they took fire from the gun tower opposite. Slugs whined overhead, way too close for comfort.

  Ryan shouldered the Soviet RPD. “Kick in the doors!” he growled at Chucho and Tom.

  When the MG thundered, the recoil set Ryan back on his heels. The 10-round burst punched holes in the wall of the tower, raising a cloud of dust. The gunner disappeared from view.

  Behind him, as Chucho and Tom approached the gym’s entrance, a fusillade of blasterfire roared from within, and a ravening volley of bullets came flying through the closed doors.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The rain of outgoing slugs rattled the gym doors in their frames, the ragged, random exit holes making them look like giant cheese graters. Ryan moved closer to the building’s front wall, out of the path of the ricochets. There was no telling how many blasters were cutting loose from the other side, but anyone standing in the doorway or the kill zone beyond it would have been chopped to pieces.

  “Let’s give ’em something to think about,” Tom said to Chucho, stepping away from the wall and swinging his RPD up from the hip.

  Chucho jumped to his side, then they both let it rip with their machine guns, firing back through the already holed-out doors. Teeth bared, muscular arms shuddering from the sustained buffeting of recoil, they moved to the left as they shot, edging into the killzone, sweeping the interior of the gym with a withering counterfire of 700 steel-jacketed rounds per minute. Spent brass arced from the blasters’ ejector ports, smoke and flame billowed from the muzzles, and the steel-clad doors buckled in the middle and spread apart under the hellacious, close-range barrage.

  The last of the two hundred smoking cases clinked to the concrete, and the ear-splitting clatter of the autofire echoed off in the jungle.

  There was no return fire.

  Ryan and J.B. stepped up and simultaneously booted the crumpled doors, and they crashed inward to the floor.

  While Tom and Chucho reloaded their RPDs with fresh drum mags, Ryan and J.B. burst through the doorway with their autoweapons at hip level. Wreaths of gunsmoke hung over the middle of the court. The floor between the old free throw lines was littered with bodies and blood. The Xibalba hangers-on and minor demons had taken the brunt of the exchange of firepower. Some of them still stirred, albeit feebly. It was impossible to tell which side had fired the bullets that cut them down.

  At opposite end of room, the exit doors slammed back, and bald Matachìn put up scattered covering fire as they retreated.

  J.B. and Ryan fanned out, firing as they advanced. Ryan ran for the end of the bleachers. He could see the top two rows were occupied—large figures in white robes with hideous head masks—but the spectators weren’t moving and they weren’t armed. For the moment they could be ignored.

  There were other fish to fry.

  Unmanacled for the first time in a month, and now fully armed, J.B. was all about getting payback—with interest. Fearless in his fury, J.B. charged the exit, spraying it with 9 mm slugs. He took down three of the pirates before they could clear the doors, sending them sprawling to the floor. A fourth Matachìn tried to return fire and cover his own escape, and for his trouble, he took two rounds through the throat. He dropped his weapon and clutched his spurting neck in both hands as he slipped to his knees.

  Ryan braced his RPD against the edge of a bleacher seat and punched out a stream of hot lead at the last three pirates who raced for the exit. The torrent of 7.62 mm rounds were like a flyswatter to flies. They lifted and slammed the running men into the concrete block, an
d as their bodies slumped to the floor they revealed big splotches of red splatter on the wall behind.

  Shooting erupted from outside the gym. The retreating Matachìn had stumbled into Jak’s ambush.

  The battle sounded one-sided. Because Lauren’s weapon was silenced, only the pirate return fire could be heard.

  Then the shooting abruptly stopped.

  The pirates had either chilled Jak, or they were all dead. Knowing the albino teen as he did, Ryan was guessing it was the latter. He turned his attention and the sights of his weapon on the two rows of spectators above.

  “Get your hands up!” he shouted, forgetting in the heat of the moment that there might be a language barrier.

  Chucho repeated the order in Spanish.

  None of the seated figures moved a muscle.

  “Those are the Lords of Death,” Mildred said as she, Doc and Krysty joined them at the foot of the stands. “The rulers of Xibalba.”

  Ryan did a quick head count. Thirty of them. But there were holes in the ranks. Six places were empty.

  “How come the masked assholes aren’t moving?” J.B. asked as he slapped a fresh 9 mm mag into his submachine gun and flipped the actuator, chambering the first round. “Are they already dead? Or are they stuffed?”

  “We should check to see if any of them are real,” Mildred said.

  “Yeah, I’ll check them, all right,” Chucho said, hoisting up the muzzle of his RPD. Without another word, he stitched steel-jacketed slugs across the top rows of bleachers, spraying the figures with autofire. The white-robed torsos jerked, then toppled over. Garish masks rolled off headless shoulders and bounced down the tiers of bleacher seats to the court below.

  They were all dummies.

  “Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed. “The bastards got away!”

  “Over here!” Jak shouted from the back door.

  While Ryan, J.B., Chucho and Tom ran to join him, Doc, Mildred and Krysty took a moment to bend and pick up dropped submachine guns off the dead Matachìn. They immediately checked for full mags and made sure live rounds were chambered.

  Everybody had a blaster.

  Looking out the doorway, Ryan could see the bodies of half a dozen bushwhacked pirates caught by Jak’s opening silenced burst.

  “Pinned me quick, couldn’t nail all,” the albino said ruefully. He pointed at the entrance to the cell block on the other side of a narrow courtyard. “In there.”

  “How many?” Tom said.

  “Ten, mebbe more.”

  “And the Lords of Death?” Ryan prompted. “Did you see them?”

  “Already high-tailin’, before camou fighters came out back door,” Jak said. “Five, six motherfuckers in masks, run fast. Ryan, not see anyone that fast.”

  “They duck into the cell block, too?” J.B. asked.

  “Nah, lit out for fence behind. Went through hole.”

  “Same fucking hole I cut!” Tom said.

  “Out into the jungle by now,” Ryan said. “Were they armed?”

  “Nope. Empty hands.”

  “If they went out the way we came in they’ll run right into the wild dogs,” Chucho said. “That works for me.”

  “Me, too,” Ryan said.

  “Are you gonna blow up the council place?” Krysty asked Tom.

  The trader eyed the structure dubiously. “Probably take most of the C-4 to bring it down,” he said. “But it rains a lot here, doesn’t it?”

  Chucho nodded. “Rains like holy hell.”

  “Got enough extra C-4 to blow out a supporting wall and bring down the roof,” Tom said. He quickly removed a pair of charges from Ryan’s backpack and placed them at corners of the facing wall.

  As he rejoined Ryan and the others, with a loud crack a single bullet zinged in from the direction of the cell blocks. It clipped the edge of the steel doorframe, sending sparks and bits of metal flying.

  “Let’s finish this job,” Ryan said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Following Mildred out of the gym, Harmonica Tom had the rear guard on the file. Ryan was on point as they crossed the courtyard on a dead sprint, making for the cell block’s doors. To their right was a low, windowless, shedlike building.

  Another gun crack rang out and a slug from overhead kicked up the dirt. A narrow miss for Ryan, the bullet zipped over his shoulder and hit the ground beside Jak’s left boot. Tom noted that the one-eyed warrior didn’t even flinch. However, the sniper on the cell block roof forced them to change course to the right, moving up against the maintenance shed and under the eaves of its sloping roof.

  As Tom was brushing past the shed’s closed door, it jolted mightily in its frame. Heavy bodies hurled against the inside of the metal door, trying to break it down. Claws scraped its surface, trying to rip through it. This was accompanied by a chorus of baritone snarling.

  “The Xibalbans call it Jaguar House,” Mildred told him.

  “Since when do jaguars bark and howl?” the trader remarked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said. The truth is they’ve got a bunch of feral dogs trapped in there and they use them to torture their subjects, and to keep them in line. If you go in Jaguar House, you don’t come out in one piece. You don’t come out at all. The smell of blood and the sound of gunfire has really got the dogs worked up.”

  “They smell dinner,” Tom said.

  Another single shot rang out from the roof and the bullet whizzed by Tom’s left ear. The trader raised his machine gun to his shoulder, stepped out from beside the building and away from the narrow band of concealment its eaves provided. The others needed covering fire to cross the rest of the courtyard; aside from that, Tom didn’t take kindly to slugs coming that close to his mustache. He touched off a rattling burst of autofire, aimed upward, at the edge of the roof. The lip of mildewed concrete disintegrated under the hail of lead, chunks fell away and dropped to the ground. Tom stopped shooting and waited, sights held steady on the roof line, while the others raced out from under cover for the front of the cell block. When the shooter peeked up with his weapon about five feet from where Tom thought he’d be, he shifted his aim to the target and pinned the trigger. The concrete was turned to dust by a dozen steel-jackets. The shooter fell back out of sight and his long blaster tumbled down the side of the building, crashing to the dirt below.

  When Tom reached the front of the cell block, Ryan said, “We’re going to have to blow the door. It’s locked from the inside.”

  “No problem,” Tom said. He unshouldered his backpack and from it took out a hunk of plastique already rigged with a blasting cap and a length of conventional fuze cord. He worked quickly, mashing the pliable explosive into the gap between the door hinges and frame, then he lit the fuze with a wooden match.

  The others had spread out along the foot of the wall, kneeling with their heads turned toward the building. Tom joined in the duck and cover.

  The explosion rocked the ground and sent a plume of smoke and debris flying out into the courtyard.

  Mebbe a bit too much C-4, Tom thought as he shook his head to clear it. The door frame was emptied but there were wide, branching cracks running up the side of the cell block’s wall.

  When Ryan led them inside, smoke was still pouring out the opening. The floor of the corridor was alive with small, flopping black things.

  Bats.

  Dying bats and already dead ones.

  When Tom entered last, there were still some of the leaping critters to kick aside. He looked down the central corridor. In the light of electric bulbs, filtered through smoke, it was grim, gray, decaying. A different sort of prison than the ancient fort in Veracruz, more temporary, less eternal. Instead of an oppressively low, stone ceiling, the cell block had a towering, two-storey height. But the stink of death and damnation was the same. There were four metal stairways at each corner of the narrow rectangle, each leading up to the second tier of cells and a railed walkway that completely encircled it.

  Nothing moved in front of them or abov
e them.

  But there were sounds coming out of the smoke and dust, moans of agony.

  At Ryan’s signal, they split up, four to a side of the firstfloor cells.

  Tom and Chucho held back a little, covering the second-tier walkway on the opposite side with their machine guns, while Mildred and Jak advanced ahead of them, checking the cells.

  Across the corridor, Krysty, J.B., Doc and Ryan were doing the same, advancing with caution but with focused intent.

  Tom could see the set to their jaws, the hard light in their eyes. It made him smile. All the evil that had been done by the Matachìn and their puppetmasters couldn’t be undone, but it could be stopped, once and for all. This was his true element: blood and blastersmoke and a world of hurt for the coldheart bastards.

  They passed cell doors ajar. Inside the barred cages directly opposite the doorway, prisoners or lackeys lay dead on the floor, either blown apart by the blast or chilled by flying shrap. Some of them had daggers of metal sticking out of their torsos and heads.

  Then the live ones showed up. Dozens of minor demons and toadies burst from the cells in front of them and charged through the smoke. Waving their arms, male and female, half naked, their faces horror shows of botched surgeries and rictus grins, bleeding from eyes, ears and noses, they yelled and shrieked blue murder.

  They were short of stature, carried no firearms, but they made up for that in sheer numbers and kill frenzy.

  Tom and Chucho held their fire as a 9 mm crossfire from the others chewed up and spit out the attackers. The unsilenced weapons that Mildred, Doc and Krysty had commandeered clattered earsplittingly in the concrete box. Like the bats, the bootlicks flopped and thrashed around on the floor as they died. Unlike the bats, the blood volume their wounds released was fairly spectacular.

  Tom unslung his backpack and pitched a few primed and prepped plastique charges into the empty cells. Across the corridor, Ryan was doing the same thing to the cages opposite. Then both men reshouldered their packs and picked up their RPDs and continued on.