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

  “Rot quick, too,” Jak said.

  Even in cold weather, Ryan thought. Dead stickies disintegrated and dissolved like burning candles.

  “They could have eaten the fruit and gotten poisoned,” Mildred speculated as she rose from her crouch. “Or they could have died from gunshot.”

  “The damned bugs are eating the bodies and they aren’t dead,” Krysty said, fanning flies from her eyes.

  “Neither are the wire worms,” J.B. said, gesturing with the muzzle of his Smith & Wesson scattergun.

  Between the lips of the gaping fissure that ran from the corpse’s pubis to sternum, a bolus of the blood-washed, hair-fine parasites squirmed weakly.

  “It wasn’t blasters that chilled them,” J.B. said, thumbing his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. “No empty shell casings on the road. No bullet holes in the muties, either.”

  “Too many of the abysmal creatures to be a mere ambush party,” Doc pronounced gravely. “This, my dear friends, is a steed of a different hue.”

  Doc had put into words what they were all thinking.

  During certain times of the year, the friends had encountered an odd mating ritual. Stickies swept across the hellscape in a living wave, gathering numbers to breed. Some, like these perhaps, dropped dead of exertion along the way. The muties mated en masse, indiscriminantly, for days at a time. To be caught in the path of their sexual rampage meant horrible death. Not just from the needle teeth. Stickies had adhesive glands in their palms and their fingers were lined with tiny suckers; they killed by pulling their victims limb from limb.

  “You’re right, Doc,” Ryan said. “They’re breeders.”

  “Mebbe we’ve missed them?” Krysty said hopefully. “Mebbe they’ve already passed us by.”

  “They’re in front of us, then,” Mildred said. “They could be anywhere ahead.”

  “Mebbe so,” Ryan said, shifting the sling and the weight of his Steyr SSG 70 sniper rifle from his right arm to his left, “but we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to keep following the road east. We can’t bust that black brush without getting torn to shreds, and we sure as hell can’t go back the way we came.”

  J.B. checked his weapon, cracking the combat pump gun’s action just enough to see the rim of a chambered, high brass buckshot round. Snapping the slide forward, he said, “Guess we’d better get on with it, then.”

  Chapter Two

  They were about a quarter mile from the black to brown color change when a crackle of small-arms fire erupted in the near distance ahead. At the sudden noise, the companions reacted as a well-honed unit. J.B., Doc and Mildred ducked to the left shoulder; Ryan, Krysty and Jak to the right. Crouching, weapons up, in an instant they were ready to pour withering fire down the road.

  The initial burst was joined by others, which turned into a frenzy of overlapping gunshots.

  But the shooting wasn’t aimed at them.

  “Perhaps another band of travelers has been set upon by the stickies,” Doc suggested.

  “Or road warriors could be resolving a dispute among themselves,” Mildred countered.

  “If they’ve got that many bullets to burn,” Ryan said, “they’ve probably got extra food and water.”

  “Can’t tell without a look-see,” J.B. said.

  “Scout ahead,” Jak offered, already moving forward.

  Ryan reached out a hand and stopped the albino. “No recce,” he said. “There’s no point. We’ve got nowhere to retreat. Whatever’s up ahead, we’ve got to get past it. We need to go in full force.”

  As they advanced low and fast along the highway’s shoulder, the melee of shooting was interrupted by two rocking booms, one after another. Too loud to be grens. Way too loud. Down the road, at the horizon line, a huge plume of off-white smoke and beige dust billowed skyward. It was hard for Ryan to imagine Deathlands’ motorbike traders blowing each other up over a few knapsacks of predark spoils. High explosives were far too valuable to waste.

  Ryan and the others kept moving. The firing ahead dwindled to feeble, scattered bursts. Apparently the tide of battle had turned, or the combatants had managed to destroy each other. Either way, there would be less argument over who-owned-what when the companions burst onto the scene.

  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the gunfire stopped completely.

  Another column of smoke slowly snaked up in front of them. This plume was oily black and much skinnier, the source hidden down in the river valley, below their line of sight.

  For a moment, over the slap of his own footfalls, Ryan thought he heard the wind in his ears, high and shrill. But there was no wind; the air was dead calm. As they closed on the entrance to the highway bridge that spanned the riverbed, it sounded more like cats fighting, screaming.

  The roadway ended abruptly just beyond the start of the bridge deck in a ragged lip of asphalt and concrete. The five-hundred-yard-long structure had collapsed, probably shaken apart by shock waves on nukeday. The tops of the bridge’s massive support pillars stretched off in a straight line to the far side of the gorge. They were crowned by short sections of broken-off highway and guard rail. There were yawning, impassable gaps between them.

  The screaming from below continued.

  Unslinging the Steyr longblaster and flipping up the lens covers of its scope, Ryan crept forward, past the bike trails that had been worn into the hardpan on either side of the collapsed roadway—travelers had apparently forged an alternate route to the other end of the bridge and the resumption of the highway. Ryan peered over the verge on one knee, bringing the rifle’s buttstock to his shoulder, looking over, not through, the optics.

  In a fraction of a second, he took it all in.

  There were two parallel, north-south running slopes in the valley below them. The first was a gradual shelf, then came the steep drop-off to the river bottom, which mostly lay out of sight because of the view angle. The edge of the drop-off was marked by overlapping blast rings with black scorch marks at their epicenters. Inside the circles, the concrete rubble had been swept clean of dust. Dead stickies and parts of same lay scattered around the joined circumferences. Beyond the litter of death, the blast rings were haloed with crimson.

  The bridge deck lay in a line of massive, jumbled chunks on the ground, chunks that sprouted rusted rebar bristles. Amid the fallen blocks, about a hundred yards away, the hapless motorcycle crew had made camp for the night.

  It was also where they made their last stand.

  Immediately, Ryan caught frantic movement among the concrete slabs. A pair of norm survivors—the screamers—were being circled and set upon by packs of half-naked muties. Other stickies played tug of war with the corpses of fallen bikers.

  And that wasn’t the worst part.

  “Nukin’ hell!” J.B. growled over Ryan’s shoulder.

  Seventy-five yards away, dense black smoke poured up from a pile of offroad motorbikes. They were completely enveloped in flame. At the edges of the blaze, spindly armed muties gyrated with abandon, empty plastic jerri-cans of gasoline lay scattered at their feet. Stickies loved fire almost as much as they loved senseless chilling. Stickies didn’t ride—machinery of any kind was beyond their limited understanding. Eight of the muties were shoving the remaining four dirt bikes toward the conflagration by the handlebars and rear cargo racks.

  “Go! Go!” Ryan snarled back at the others as he thumbed the right rear of the Steyr’s receiver, sliding off the safety and peering through the scope with his one good eye. He could have opened up on the muties attacking the survivors, and mebbe, just mebbe driven them off their defenseless victims before they were torn to shreds, but if he had done that, the last of the motorcycles would have surely burned.

  And the motorcycles were the companions’ only way out.

  Ryan held the crosshairs low to compensate for the down-angled, close-range shot. He took a stationary lead on the stickie pushing the front of the first motorcycle, aiming at the head, as stickies were hard to kill otherwise. As h
e tightened the trigger to breakpoint, the companions were already skidding down the bike trail to his right, beelining for the pyre. His predark Austrian sniper rifle barked and bucked hard into the crook of his shoulder. With the gunshot echoing in the chasm, Ryan rode the recoil wave back onto the target. Through the optics he saw his stickie target bowled over. When it went down, it took the bike down, too, in a cloud of beige dust. Ryan worked the butter-smooth 60-degree bolt, locking down on a fresh 7.62 mm NATO round. He ignored the stickie standing frozen and empty-handed over the rear of the dropped motorcycle.

  Chilling them all was secondary at this point.

  Perhaps impossible.

  And with any luck, unnecessary.

  He swung his sights to the right, compensating for the suddenly altered course of the stickies. The daisy chain of bike-pushing muties was so focused on the bonfire, on adding more fuel to the blaze, on doing their little arm-waving, stickie fire dance, that they didn’t run for cover. They just lowered their hairless heads and pressed onward. Ryan touched off a second round. The 147-grain slug hit a handlebar stickie at the base of the neck, shattering its spinal column and blowing out half its throat in a twinkling puff of pink. The nearly beheaded mutie bounced like a ragdoll off the handlebars and fork, flopping to the ground on its back. The rear pusher couldn’t hold the dirt bike upright. It toppled over onto the downed stickie’s legs.

  From below the bridge came a chaotic rattle of single shots: Krysty and Mildred’s .38s, Jak’s .357 Magnum, J.B.’s 12-gauge and Doc’s black-powder .44. Around the bonfire, struck by a hail of slugs, the stickie dancers jerked to a brand-new beat. As they fell to earth, the companions charged. A center-chest scattergun blast lifted and hurled the last of the dancers backward into the blaze, where it briefly thrashed, fried and died.

  Suddenly sealed off from their goal by a row of blasters, the bike-pushing stickies stopped in their tracks. As they dumped the motorcycles, the last mutie in line spun toward the campsite, toward its brother-sister creatures who were merrily disjointing dead traders and tearing off their flesh in strips. The stickie opened the black hole of its mouth and from high in its throat, shrieked like a teakettle—for help.

  Already locked on target, Ryan snapped the cap. As the sniper rifle boomed, it punched hard into his temple. The NATO slug slammed the stickie sideways and down, turning off the piercing squeal like a switch. Too late. As the gunshot resounded in the valley and the mortally wounded creature dervished in the dirt, arms flapping, legs kicking, the other muties abandoned their sport and scurried to the edge of the rubble field, regrouping for an attack on new victims.

  Fresh screams and bloody meat. New bones to crack, marrow to spill.

  Closing fast on the dropped motorcycles, the companions spread out in a skirmish line and fired at will. J.B. shot from the hip, Mildred from her Olympic stance; both with deadly effect. Smoke and flame belched from Doc’s ancient blaster, lead balls blasting through stickie chests and backs as they turned to flee.

  J.B. and Doc quickly booted the corpses off the bikes while Krysty, Jak and Mildred used speedloaders to recharge their wheel guns. In front of them, fifty or more muties massed behind a slab of bridge deck. Waving their pale arms over their heads, the stickies made kissing sounds with their lipless mouths, jigging to their own silent, hardwired hip-hop, working themselves into a mindless fury.

  Ryan’s predark longblaster was no longer an option. Single shots from the Steyr couldn’t turn back stickies swept up in a chill frenzy. Slinging the rifle, the one-eyed man vaulted for the side of the road and the crude bike trail. The downslope was close to sixty degrees, and the path practically a straight line. He half skiied, half fell 150 feet to the bottom. He hit the ground running, yanking his SIG-Sauer from hip leather.

  At the same instant, the stickies broke from cover and rushed the five companions, who had closed ranks to concentrate the effect of their weapons. Because Ryan knew he couldn’t reach them in time, he sprinted wide right to flank the ten-abreast, mutie charge and give himself a clear line of fire.

  In an elegant dueling stance, left hand braced on the silver lion’s-head pommel of his unsheathed sword stick, Doc started the fusillade with a mighty boom. A yard of flame and gout of black-powder smoke belched from the muzzle of the LeMat’s top barrel. A fraction of a second later the others cut loose a ragged volley.

  Under the rippling smack of bullet impacts, the center of the stickie front wave crumpled and folded. Half of the closely following second rank crashed to earth, as well; some from high-velocity through-and-throughs, but most were simply tripped up, unable to avoid the sudden tangle of legs and torsos. Which, momentarily at least, saved their wretched lives.

  The third, fourth and fifth rows of attackers split down the middle and veered around their own fallen, like a torrent flowing around a boulder field. The smell and taste of the aerosolized gore, the shrill cries of pain made them all the more frantic. As they reformed their inhuman wave, the companions’ blasters roared again.

  The few muties in front who had escaped the first volley—heedless of their exposure, driven by urges too powerful to deny—high-kicked to close distance on the companions. As a result, the second round of fire was at near point-blank range, a cross-chest barrage that swept the stickies off their bare feet.

  Ryan advanced on the mutie flank, holding the SIG-Sauer in a solid, two-handed grip. Because both he and his targets were moving, it wasn’t the time for fine shooting. The blaster barked and bucked again and again, action cycling. Ryan punched out rapid-fire, center body shots as the tripped muties tried to scramble to their feet. The mutie bastards were so pumped up by the prospect of more chilling, that unless it was a head shot it took two slugs to put some of them down.

  A round punched through a scrambler and slammed the runner behind it in the side of the head. The others dashed past like they had blinders on, even as Ryan blew their packmates to hell.

  His next shot smacked a sprinting stickie high in the upper arm, and the impact spun it around ninety degrees. It then launched itself at him, banshee wild, mouth gaping, needle teeth bared, open palms leaking strands of milky adhesive. Body language notwithstanding, the stickie’s black eyes were devoid of emotion, like a shark’s or a doll’s.

  Ryan fired the SIG-Sauer into the center of the open yap. The mutie’s hairless head snapped back as if it had been poleaxed, eyes skyward as a glistening strawberry mist gusted from the back of its skull. Bright arterial blood shot from the creature’s nose holes as it crashed onto its back, the soles of its trembling feet black with crusted grime.

  There wasn’t enough time to dump the SIG’s spent mag, reload, aim and fire at the stickies veering his way. He could have unslung the Steyr from his back and gotten off one or two shots before they were on him. Not enough to make a difference. Shifting the pistol to his left hand, Ryan whipped his eighteen-inch panga from its leg sheath.

  He glanced to the left as the LeMat’s shotgun barrel thundered. Along with a plume of caustic smoke it spewed forth the combination of broken glass and potmetal fragments that Doc called his “facelifter” load—at a range of ten feet, that’s exactly what it did. It was his last shot. Doc immediately raised his edged weapon, neatly sidestepping to avoid an oncoming stickie, simultaneously rolling the wrist of his sword hand. With surgical precision and speed too quick for the eye to follow, the point of his rapier blade opened a second, grinning mouth three inches below the spike-rimmed maw the mutie had been born with. Blood sheeting down its naked chest, the hellspawn dropped to its knees in the dirt, then onto all fours.

  Also out of cartridges, J.B. used the barrel of his M-4000 scattergun like a short club to bash and smash the heads of the monsters that lunged for him, beating back the horde, providing cover and time for Krysty, Mildred and Jak to reload.

  From the git-go, based on the companions’ rate of fire, their weapons’ mag capacities, the stickie numbers and the size of the battlefield, Ryan had figured that combat wou
ld devolve to hand-to-hand. To be pulled down by this enemy was to be torn apart.

  Fully aware of what was on the line, the one-eyed warrior met chill rage with chill rage. The heavy blade of his panga was made for chopping and hacking, and that’s how he used it. The panga sizzled as it cleaved the air, hardly slowing when it met mutie flesh and bone. It clipped wrists into stumps, left arms dangling free from shoulder sockets, and opened godawful, diagonal torso slashes, from nipple to opposing hip. In his wake, mewling stickies scrabbled on their knees in the dust, trying to collect and stuff back the slimy gray coils of their guts.

  The sight of their fellows falling in pieces under the bloody blade didn’t give the stickies pause. As they threw themselves at him, Ryan’s mind and body were one, measuring attack angles, kill order, the necessary rhythm of perfectly executed forehands and backhands—all in a fraction of a fraction of a second.

  Stepping around another set of outstretched sucker fingers, Ryan swung the panga so hard that he sliced off the top of the stickie’s head, front to back. Half a loaf of pale, cross-cut brain flopped steaming to the ground, followed by its stone-dead, former owner.

  Their weapons loaded, Mildred, Krysty and Jak rejoined the fray. They split up to get clear firing lanes, then head shot the last of the surviving stickies at close range.

  As quickly as he had switched it on, Ryan shut off the rampage, but the sustained burst of all-out effort left him gasping for breath. His kerchief mask’s hem dripped pink from its point, pink from his pouring sweat mixed with sprays of stickie blood.

  As the echoes of gunfire faded, screams from the rubble field became audible. Anguished, rasping screams.

  “Start up the bikes,” Ryan said, wiping the panga’s blade on his pant leg before he scabbarded it. “Come with me, Doc,” he called to the old man, who was recovering his sword sheath. As the two of them trotted for the remains of the travelers’ campsite, Ryan dropped the SIG’s spent mag into his palm and swapped it with a full one from his pocket.