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  Then he burped and felt a little better.

  Chapter Seven

  Daniel Desipio carefully fished a walnut-size cornmeal dumpling from his stew with the tip of his spoon. He deposited it on his tongue, shut his eyes and let it slowly melt in his mouth. Rapture.

  This was the lap of luxury.

  A cell with a flush toilet, and a ceiling tall enough for him to stand up in.

  A bunk with a mattress to sleep on.

  Food that didn’t make him gag and then come squirting out his nose.

  For an enano in the service of the Lords of Death, life didn’t get any better than this. And there was an added, extraspecial bonus, which had yet to kick in.

  The barrage of questions from the captives next door had stopped as soon as the food was delivered. Daniel knew they had to be Padre Islanders, fresh from one of the Matachìn tugs.

  The questions resumed after his neighbors finished eating.

  “Where are we being taken?” one of them asked through the air vent.

  “I don’t know any more than you do,” Daniel lied. He was a little miffed that the subject of conversation, post-prandial, had turned away from SR and his predark literary accomplishments.

  “Why were we chosen?” another man asked. “And all the other galley slaves slaughtered?”

  “Sorry, I don’t have a clue about that, either.” Another lie.

  Daniel knew all about the selection criteria. Although he hadn’t endured the process himself, he had witnessed it many times. It had been developed over a century of trial and error. The galley slave ordeal removed the weakest from the pool of potential infectees, those who would not survive the rigors of inoculation anyway. That saved time and effort that would have been otherwise wasted on useless corpses. On top of the physical hardiness and resilience necessary to recover from the medical procedure, the chosen enanos also had to be convincing as traders, sluts, mercies and the like, convincing enough to infiltrate and infect a target population without raising suspicion. Daniel’s next-door neighbors were all English speakers, which meant the target they’d eventually be aimed at would be their own home turf and his—Deathlands.

  He heard muffled belching sounds from the other side of the wall.

  “Is the food always this good here?” one of the men asked.

  “Don’t know. This is the first I’ve had of it.”

  More lies.

  Daniel could have told them the truth about everything, exactly what was going to happen to them, the precise order of events and why. He could have tortured his neighbors with the gruesome details, making them endure the rest of the voyage in horror and trembling dread. But he restrained himself. Knowledge was the only power he had. No way would he give it up for nothing.

  Daniel was already beginning to feel the effects of the food. A spreading, delicious warmth and heaviness through his limbs and chest. A dryness in the mouth. Sleepiness. Some difficulty concentrating.

  He didn’t know what the ship’s cooks used—some kind of tasteless, odorless opiate, most likely. A precise dose based on estimated body weight was mixed in with each bowl of delicious grub. Grub that had to be gobbled. Whatever it was they used, the chemical restraint transformed the angry, hostile captives into peaceful and compliant zombies. It forced them to sleep and to rest twenty or more hours a day, and allowed them to rebuild their bodily reserves. This was vital because of the stress of the upcoming inoculation procedure. Only a fraction of plague-carrier candidates actually lived through the entire ordeal, which involved being infected by cells taken from a carrier’s marrow.

  For his part, Daniel had always enjoyed the drug’s effect. He found it made the voyage to Xibalba pass even more pleasantly, as in a dream: doped up with a satisfyingly full belly; a real bed to sleep on; no one trying to chill you; no one abusing you; and no thoughts about the pain and suffering to come. The latter because under the drug’s influence there was no way to hold a coherent thought in your head.

  Not even one of terror.

  And as Daniel knew from long experience, it all went downhill from here, starting with the withdrawal symptoms, but that was later, much later at the end of the journey, at the gates of hell.

  He noted that his neighbors had stopped asking their annoying questions. Daniel thought he heard snoring coming through the vent.

  Scratched into the wall of his cell beside his bunk were the words La comida es veneno.

  The food is poison.

  Maybe so, he thought as he slowly chewed a last, succulent morsel of pork. But at least it ain’t Alpo.

  Setting aside the bowl, he curled up to sleep until breakfast.

  Flapjacks and bacon with a big ol’ side of stupefy.

  Yum.

  Chapter Eight

  Ryan’s smiling mirror image stood up from the floor of the cell. His naked body was streaked with caked-on filth. About an inch shorter than Cawdor, he had the same rangy, powerful build and shoulder-length, black curly hair.

  Up close and face-to-face, the resemblance was not so startling, Ryan decided.

  The man’s nose was wider, as were the cheekbones. His chin was narrower and a bit less rugged. The man’s skin was much darker than Ryan’s, reflecting perhaps some indio heritage. Although the black eye patch was similar, the surviving eye he stared into was not sky-blue; it was a deep brown, almost black. The jagged welt of scar that divided the ruined eye socket ran close to horizontal, starting on the forehead above the bridge of the nose and curving down around the top of the cheek; Ryan’s scar on the other hand was nearly vertical, slicing straight down from above the eyebrow. In the light of the caged bulb strung on the ceiling, his cell mate’s teeth looked very white. With manacled hands, the man played with a small flat pebble of limestone, tumbling it expertly over the backs of his fingers. The back and forth, back and forth was so practiced it was automatic, if not unconscious. He managed the feat without even looking down.

  “Who the hell are you?” Ryan said.

  “The priests have convinced the red sashes and most of the campesinos that I’m the flesh of your flesh, your brother, Hunahpu.” The man spoke English.

  “You’re no brother of mine.”

  “No, of course not. But it suits the priests and their distant masters if everyone believes they’ve captured the living embodiment of the fabled Hero Twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque.”

  “Who might they be?”

  “Part of the ancient Mayan story of the beginning of the world,” Ryan’s cell mate said. “The original Hero Twins, One-Hunahpu and Seven-Hunahpu, were the third creation of the gods of the universe. They were killed and dismembered by the Lords of Death. Their offspring, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, avenged the murders through trickery and magic, and in so doing consigned the twelve lords and all their subject devils to the underworld, thereby limiting their power to do harm to innocent human beings. A more recent myth, devised by the Atapuls and their priests, claims that nukeday undid the Hero Twins’ five-thousand-year-old victory and opened the gates to hell. Since then, so the story goes, the Lords of Death have roamed free on Earth in the form of the Atapuls. They and their devils spread plague, pestilence, war and suffering in their wake.

  “The story presents two opposing forces—one offers light to the world, the other darkness. My people believe because the Hero Twins beat the Lords of Death once before, and held them in check for five thousand years they are humanity’s last remaining hope. If the Atapul clan and their priests can convince everyone that they have killed the forces of light, that hope is gone. When you and I die in public view, they believe the growing resistance to their rule will crumble. And they will reign unchallenged over humankind forever.”

  “If you aren’t Hunahpu,” Ryan said, “then who the fuck are you? And where did you learn to speak English?”

  “I’m called Chucho. I’ve been an outlaw with a price on my head for more than ten years now. I was first imprisoned by priests in Cancun, another of the Atapul city-states, for a cr
ime I didn’t commit. They did this so they could rob my family and take everything that was ours. While I was locked away in prison, they killed all my relatives and moved into our house and onto our lands.

  “Cancun’s prison was full of very bad men who taught me to rob and to murder, and how to do it well. When I had learned all I could from them, I found a way to escape. Within days, I fell in with a dramatic troupe that traveled from town to town along the coast. The actors showed me how to disguise myself, how to throw my voice, how to do magic tricks, how to pickpocket. One of them taught me your language.”

  Chucho held up his handcuffs for Ryan to see.

  “No keyhole,” he said, shaking them. “No bolt, either. They are welded shut. There is no lock made that I can’t pick. And they keep me naked for a reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “So I can’t hide weapons under my clothes. Out on the road, I’d carry as many as five blasters at once, in holsters, pockets, boots, my hat, taped against my skin. The red sashes sometimes got lucky and caught me at a checkpoint or on the street. After collecting three or four pistols, they would give up the search, figuring they had them all. Before they knew it, I’d have a little .22 bellygun going pop-pop-pop point-blank into their heads. I killed six of the bastards and walked away from the stockade of a fortified garrison up north. After that happened, they got smarter.

  “I’ve been caught six times since then, and condemned to death six times, but I always found a way to escape before the sentence could be carried out. And when I returned to their world, I made the bastards pay, and I took pleasure in it. The priests put a bounty on my head in gold, and every year I was free they raised it higher. Even so, no one ever turned me in. The people wrote songs about me instead, and they still sing them in the cantinas when there are no red sashes around.”

  “Songs?”

  “Of celebration, because I killed their oppressors, stole treasure from the Lords of Death, and all that I stole I gave back to the people robbed and brutalized by the priests and red sashes. What I did was something the people will never forget. Or the priests or their masters for that matter.

  “Last spring there was an uprising in one of the western provinces. The silver miners there went on a rampage, killing the red sashes with shovels and picks, and burning down their garrison. Because I happened to be there and was seen helping in the fighting, the priests blamed it all on me. That’s when they started calling me ‘Hunahpu’ and began circulating the rumors about the Hero Twins coming to life and waging final war on the Lords of Death.”

  Ryan watched the pebble roll over the backs of his cell mate’s knuckles. From the moment Chucho stood, the rolling pebble had never stopped, never even hesitated. His mirror image had amazing finger speed and dexterity.

  In the hellscape Ryan had come across plenty of crazy, lying blowhards. They congregated around campfires and on the front porches of gaudy houses, and amused themselves with pissing contests. If Ryan hadn’t seen giant papier-mâché models of this man’s head on sticks, he wouldn’t have believed a word he said. But you didn’t get your head waved around on a pole if you were a nobody. Chucho was right up there with the Atapuls and the plague faces that dominated and terrified the people of Veracruz. That he was locked away in the deepest, darkest hole of this stinking shit pit of a prison, that his handcuffs were welded shut, that he was naked, were all testaments to the danger his captors felt he represented.

  If there were explanations for the facts on the table other than the ones Chucho had given, Ryan couldn’t think of them.

  Believing was different from trusting. He had no reason to trust Chucho, even though they were scheduled to die together.

  “And you who are not my brother, what is your name?” Chucho said. “What did you do to end up here? You come from Tierra de la Muerte?”

  “The name’s Ryan. You’re right, I come from Deathlands. I got trapped in the wrong place, at the wrong time doing a little trading. Pirates took me and my partners for slaves, made us row down here.”

  “And you had the terrible misfortune to look like Chucho, only in reverse.”

  “Some things can’t be helped.”

  “You have traveled down many hard roads. I can see it in the eye you still have left. I see many dead. I see destruction.”

  “Been blamed for some bad things I didn’t do, just like you.”

  “I think in Tierra de la Muerte the bastards who prey on the weak have nightmares about you coming to visit. So perhaps we are related after all?”

  “How long have you been a prisoner here?” Ryan asked.

  “Weeks and I still haven’t found a way out. This revellín is escape proof, so they say. The stone walls are six feet thick. They can’t be tunneled through. The floor is even thicker. It runs straight down into bedrock coral. No one has ever escaped from this prison alive. The dead leave here in wheelbarrows every day. Mebbe if I had another month I might be able to figure a way out, but we don’t have that much time. We die before dawn the day after tomorrow.”

  “What about the trial?”

  “If you’re thinking you might get justice from these animals, you can forget it. They don’t know the meaning of the word. The trial is a sham, a chance for the priests to chant and burn incense and wear their judge hats in public. They want to get the execution over and done with as quickly as possible so I don’t slip away again. It’s funny, even though they’re priests, they don’t have much in the way of faith.”

  “We don’t have their stinking religion in Deathlands.”

  “Not yet, but just you wait. It’s been moving up the coast ever since Skydark. The people of Veracruz—the Jarochos—escaped the worst of Armageddon only to be set upon seventy-five years later by the Matachìn. They hit the city first with plague, then with religion and the red sash traitors. The sickness they brought was like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Whole neighborhoods were wiped out. And when the disease was at its peak, the pirates sailed into the bay and flattened the resistance with a relatively small number of fighters. The priests moved in right behind them with images of new gods to worship. They painted the churches the color of blood and told the people if they didn’t obey their every command, the Lords of Death, who had been resurrected by the fires of global destruction, would bring back the plague to punish them. From that day forward, everything returned to the ancient ways, at the time of creation, when the Lords of Death ruled the world.”

  “Wait a bastard minute,” Ryan said. “You’re telling me that disease was a weapon of war? That it was turned loose on purpose?”

  “A terrible weapon, indeed, my friend. The tidal waves of Skydark reduced the population of this city to a quarter of a million people. After the plague struck, the living numbered less than fifty thousand. The killing was indiscriminate and wholesale. Within ten days of the outbreak, the graveyards of Veracruz overflowed. The streets were heaped high with bodies. Because of the volume of corpses, and the effects of the tropical heat, they had to be put in a mass grave.”

  Having seen what the disease had done on Padre Island, Ryan tried to visualize that many people sick and dying. And he could not. It was a horror beyond imagining.

  “We learned later how it was done,” Chucho said. “The Matachìn had seeded the target cities with enanos of the Lords of Death.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They sent in infected people, plague carriers, in advance of the attack, to weaken the opposition with the sickness and guide the invasion.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Cawdor swore. “There was this two-faced little bastard on the island where we were captured, where the sickness had struck. When we tried to escape, he turned us over to the Matachìn. He had to be working for them. You’re saying he was a plague carrier, too? That he brought all that death with him?”

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”

  “He came back with us on the tug,” Ryan said. “The pirates kept him belowdecks the whol
e time. He never saw the light of day, not in three weeks.”

  “That’s understandable. If he’d been allowed out, the disease might have killed everyone aboard.”

  “And here I thought the Matachìn were keeping the stinking piece of crap down there for his safety, so the people he’d betrayed wouldn’t tear him apart,” Ryan said, shaking his head.

  “No, they did it to protect themselves from what he carries,” Chucho said.

  “Explain something else to me, then,” Ryan continued. “The disease weapon didn’t chill everyone on Padre Island. From what you just said, it didn’t chill everyone in Veracruz, either. Why?”

  “The survivors either had resistance to the sickness or somehow managed to avoid being infected. Once the Matachìn established military control of the city, they and their priests selected red sashes from the fifty thousand who were left. They were picked for their willingness to obey orders and to hurt others. There are less than a thousand of them in Veracruz and outlying areas. The threat of the plague coming back keeps the people in line. No one wants that. Even in the countryside, people obey because of fear. Priests have churches there, too, but they are really just warehouses for collecting valuables—precious ores, fuel and food. Everyone pays a tax to them, otherwise the red sashes come and take even more.”

  “And you gave the taxes back.”

  “With interest.”

  “How are they going to chill us?”

  “It won’t be pretty, that’s for sure. And like I said, it will be in public. Not much point in killing your fabled enemies if no one sees it.”

  “So the executions won’t be here?”

  “No, they’ll hold the trial here, so the ceremony won’t be interrupted. After the guilty verdict they’ll take us back into the city tomorrow night for the killing. There will be another big parade, ending at the lighthouse. They’ll murder us in plain sight of every citizen of Veracruz. Then it’ll be our flesh-and-bone heads on sticks paraded around the Zócalo. And the mob will cheer at gunpoint.”