Plague Lords (Empire of Xibalba, #1) (8 page)

Krysty leaned close to Ryan and said, “Did you notice we picked up a shadow?”

“Yeah, I marked him.” The handlebar-mustached harmonica player had been dogging them around the store, edging closer and closer as if trying to overhear their conversation.

The emporium’s fuel station was a section of floor space covered by a variety of container types and sizes, all with air-tight screw tops. The only other thing they had in common was that they were translucent. That way a prospective buyer couldn’t judge the quality by the color, or lack of same.

J.B. unscrewed a lid from a plastic jug, releasing a whoosh of built-up pressure. He then took a whiff of the contents.

Before J.B. could give his assessment of the product, the musician spoke up. “You don’t want none of that,” he said. “BoomT waters down his gas.”

Ryan took in the deep tan, weather-seamed gray eyes, gnarled, scarred hands, and the densely muscled arms and shoulders. Harmonica Man wasn’t nearly as old as he looked at first glance—a life of brutal work and privation had prematurely aged him. There was a light in his eyes that Ryan recognized, a young man’s light. The silver mouth organ wasn’t his only sidearm. A massive, stainless-steel .45 ACP revolver, a Smith & Wesson Model 625, rode in a beat-up canvas holster low on his right hip.

“Some folks say the fat man pees in it for fun,” the musician added. “Whether it’s stretched with water or piss, it’s no more than seventy octane. Won’t get you far. And it’ll wreck your engines for sure.”

J.B. nodded to Ryan as he screwed back the cap. “He’s right. It’s more crap,” he said. “It’s all crap.”

“If you want not-crap,” the musician said, “then you need to see BoomT’s private stock, the top-quality stuff he hides away for himself.”

“You mean, behind the fence?” Mildred asked.

“No, that’s temporary storage. He’s got a treasure vault down in the basement for the best merchandise. If you go back and complain to him, there’s a slight chance he might let you shop there. But since he’s already got your goods, he’ll probably tell you take it or leave it. You folks should really be dealing with me.”

“What do you mean?” Ryan said. “The deal is done.”

Before the musician could respond, Jak nudged Ryan with an elbow and pointed toward the security cage’s open gate. A sec man was walking out with a brick of their C-4 in his hand.

“Oh shit,” Ryan said.

Breaking into a trot, he and the others managed to cut the guy off before he reached the Winnebago exit. On closer inspection, Ryan could see the sec man had the brick that he had opened in front of BoomT and taken the test wad from.

“Say, where are you going with that?” Ryan asked him.

“Ol’ BoomT found some batteries,” the sec man replied. “He got that detonator’s test light to go on. Come on out and watch, it should be extry good. He’s gonna make himself a swimming pool.”

BoomT sat in the shade of his golf cart’s red-striped canopy, eating a whole, cold roast chicken barehanded like an ear of corn. Fifteen feet away, under the baking sun, a quartet of indentured servants grunted and groaned as they swung pickaxes high overhead, slamming them into the ground. They had cracked a seam in the asphalt and were burrowing into the concrete-like compacted clay beneath. The going got easier once they broke through the bottom of the layer of hardpan. They tossed aside the axes, picked up long-handled shovels and resumed work, digging a deep, narrow hole.

A half dozen of his sec men stood around their gargantuan leader with shouldered assault rifles, telescopic sights sweeping the flatland of vacant streets and exposed foundations for potential threats.

Because BoomT was unsure of the consequences when a full kilo of C-4 was detonated, he had decided to err on the side of caution. He sited his experiment as far as possible from the emporium so it wouldn’t be accidently damaged, either in the initial blast or by the debris fall. That meant the swimming pool excavation was going to be much closer to the outside edge of the parking lot than he had originally envisioned.

BoomT could see a man on a bicycle pedaling madly toward him from the direction of the big-box store, leaving behind a swirling wake of beige dust.

The entrepreneur spit a mouthful of chicken bones over his left shoulder onto the ground. Rotating the slippery carcass, he attacked the breast and thigh on the opposite side. Even One-Eye trying to cheat him by stealing the batteries couldn’t dent his ebullient mood. He was humming to himself as he fed.

What was the point of having a large quantity of high explosive if you didn’t use part of it to blow something up?

He had considered blowing up One-Eye, Pipsqueak and the two other male members of his crew along with the parking lot, but after weighing the risk and benefit, he thought better of it. Cawdor hadn’t risen to the bait about Trader’s hard and humiliating death. The fat man had watched him closely and there had been no reaction to the bad news, nor to the mocking way it had been delivered. Not so much as a finger twitch in response. BoomT couldn’t deduce from that whether Cawdor thought the story was a lie or the truth, or whether he had heard the full account somewhere else and that’s what had drawn him to Port A ville. Because One-Eye’s weapon remained holstered, it didn’t appear that he had come for vengeance and chilling, but to do some straightforward business.

By now One-Eye had already sussed out the shabby quality of the box-store merchandise. He would demand better for his trade, which meant taking him and his crew down to the private showroom, where they could be more easily overpowered and disarmed. BoomT had decided not to chill Cawdor outright; instead he was going to remove the man’s remaining eye with a soup spoon and then turn him loose in the hellscape, helpless and as blind as a bat.

Pipsqueak, on the other hand, was gonna die hard. For BoomT it had been hate at first sight, years ago. Hated his stupid hat. Hated his squinting four-eyes. Hated his ankle-biting stature. Hated his weapons know-how. Hated most of all the fact that, way back when, he couldn’t get Dix to turn against Trader, something that cost him plenty jack.

Of all the ways of chilling at the overweight entrepreneur’s disposal, the biggest crowd pleaser was “death by backside” because it was so painful and prolonged, and at the same time so radblasted comical. BoomT simply positioned himself over a spread-eagled, helpless victim and with his full body weight, sat down. To get up again, he grabbed hold of a tow rope attached to the golf cart’s back bumper and braced his heels; when a sec man drove the cart forward, it raised him to the vertical. With judicious, over-the-shoulder aim, he could break every bone and rupture every organ. Pipsqueak was going to end up a pancake, squashed like the nearsighted little bug he was.

For all BoomT cared, his sec men could use the albino and the geezer for target practice. They preferred shooting at something alive. After an interval of time working under and over him, One-Eye’s tasty sluts would be consigned to Cantina Olé. Scroungers, male and female, would be lined up from here to Groves to have a go at those two. Pay a nukin’ premium, too.

Committing an entire kilo of C-4 to the swimming pool experiment was a crazy extravagance, of that there was no doubt. Essentially it was blowing up a whole lot of jack, but BoomT was in the habit of indulging himself. As he sucked the chicken leg clean of meat, he knew he was worth it.

The hole was finished by the time the bicycle rider skidded to a stop in front of the golf cart.

BoomT tossed away the stripped chicken carcass, wiped his fingertips on the bedspread and set the brick on the seat beside him. He pushed his raspberry mirror shades on top of his head and opened the already torn plastic wrap.

“’Nother chicken,” he said, reaching over his right shoulder with an empty hand. When the response was not immediate, he snapped his fingers impatiently.

From a Coleman cooler strapped onto the back of the cart, a sec man passed him a fresh bird.

BoomT ate with his left hand, rivulets of grease from the corners of his mouth running down his chins, and with his right he inserted the blasting cap and remote initiator into the side of the soft, golden brick.

The cart tipped alarmingly, and its springs shrieked as he slid off the seat. He waddled over to the hole and got down on his knees, dragging his baby-blue toga in the dust. Then he lowered himself onto his enormous belly. To place the charge properly, he had to reach down the hole to his armpit, straining to touch bottom. That he did while holding the roast chicken aloft in his other hand.

When he rose up from the ground, parking lot dirt had mixed with the grease on his chins and chest. Oblivious to the grime he had accumulated, BoomT pulled down his mirror shades and climbed back into the cart, taking a last bite of poultry before chucking the shredded remnant.

“Follow me,” he told the sec men and the slaves through a mouthful of meat. Driving the electric cart one-handed, he cut a quick 180-degree turn and bumped off the parking lot curb onto the wide, deserted avenue. He crossed the street, maneuvering around the wide cracks and potholes, and pulled up in a driveway. A rusting, burned-out semi-tractor and trailer lay overturned across the sidewalk. BoomT drove around behind the wreck and parked the cart.

He had always wanted to own a real swimming pool. One he could jump into to cool off. One he could float around in; with all his fat, he was virtually unsinkable. He imagined himself doing business while bobbing on his back. The golf course’s lake was far too shallow for that, and it was always mucked up with slimy stuff. The water level fluctuated seasonally, too. A real swimming pool required steep, deep sides.

Like a blast crater.

When the others were safely in the lee of the tipped-over semitrailer, BoomT daintily wiped the grease from his fingers onto the bedspread’s fringe. Then he took out the detonator.

“Fire in your hole!” he bellowed.

His sec men stuck fingers in their ears and hunkered down. The slaves did the same, hunkering even lower.

Flipping off the device’s safety, his eyes alight with glee, BoomT pressed the little red button.

Ryan made no attempt to stop the sec man from exiting the building with the C-4. The companions had already drawn the unwanted attention of the guards stationed inside the store’s entrance. He told the others in a low tone, “We need to move now, and we need to quickstep. Don’t run until we get outside.”

“Wait a minute!” the musician called to their backs as they left him standing there.

The companions headed for the doors at the south end of the store, purposeful, determined. Their exodus drew some curious looks from other shoppers, but that couldn’t be helped.

When they didn’t wait as the musician had asked, he ran to catch up to them. Walking stride for stride alongside Ryan, he demanded, “Where’re you going in such a radblasted hurry? You ain’t taken out your trade, yet.”

“We got other business, more important business.”

As Ryan took in the man’s confounded face, he imagined he could see the gears of his mind turning over the available facts—under different circumstances it might have been funny. A bad detonator was now a good detonator, now the pack of C-4 was under lock and key, and now the former owners of the precious commodity were hightailing it, empty-handed.

“You bastards,” the harmonica player hissed at Ryan. “The detonator. It’s all about the detonator, isn’t it? You bastards booby-trapped the cargo.”

“Unless you wanna get gut-stabbed and left behind,” Ryan warned him in an even voice, “you’d better shut your yap.”

The warning went unheeded. “That backpack was part of my cargo,” the musician snarled. “I bought the C-4, I paid for it in advance.”

“In times past, possession was considered to be nine-tenths of the law,” Doc informed him as they closed on the guard post at the exit doors. “Of course the very idea of ‘law’ is now relegated to the realm of myth and misunderstanding. And presently none of us possess anything more valuable than our own lives. Which, I hasten to add, hang precariously in the balance.”

“That shit is mine!”

“Not the time to discuss who owns what,” Ryan told him. “What’s done is done. We can’t get into the cage to disarm the booby trap. We need to get distance from here. A far distance.”

The man with the mustache shut up. From his expression he didn’t like it, but he shut up.

Until that moment Ryan was unsure whether he was going to have to chill the guy on the spot, to cut his throat with one slash of the panga, and dump him on the floor to bleed out under a pile of unwashed, second- or third-hand clothing. Until that moment there was no way of telling whether the musician was going to make a ruckus and turn them in to get back his cache of explosive. In the end, he had made the smart decision. For one thing, getting the C-4 back before it blew up was a fifty-fifty proposition, at best. For another, he knew there was more of the stuff somewhere—“part of my cargo”—and he wanted it.

Ryan thought about the other folks in the store, the shoppers not the sec men. He thought about them for a full five seconds. There wasn’t time to convince the innocent that they should abandon the building, and trying to do that would alert the guards and get everyone trapped inside. It would get everybody dead. The circumstance was unfortunate, but it was out of any of their control. Bottom line: you had to protect your own.

And the corollary: shit happened.

The companions and the harmonica player were forced to stop at the building’s south exit. BoomT’s sec men had set up a narrow, barricaded passage with tables set out for the examination of merchandise. The penalty for shoplifting was the same as the penalty for pretty much everything: death.

One of the sec men checked Ryan’s chit. Noting the fact that they hadn’t picked up any gear, he said, “Why are you leaving?”

“Nature calls big-time,” Ryan lied. “We’ll be right back.”

“You got to go around to the other door if you want back in,” the guard told him as he handed back the slip of paper. “Show them your chit. Move along.”

Beyond the exit door, they stepped into blazing sun and stifling heat. There was no cover ahead; just the wide, mud-encrusted expanse of the mall’s south parking lot. Jak took point, breaking into a jog. The others followed.

“Do you have any radblasted idea what ten kilos of C-4 can do?” the musician asked Ryan as they trotted.

“Rough idea,” Ryan said.

“Then why the hell aren’t we running faster?”

“We’re waiting until we’re a little ways from the building,” Ryan replied. “Don’t want to raise suspicions and get ourselves machine-gunned from behind. Okay, Jak, that’s far enough. Let’s pour it on.”

The albino youth immediately picked up the pace, his arms pumping, long white hair flying out straight behind him.

The others strained, high-kicking, so as not to be left behind. The sun hammered against Ryan’s head and shoulders. The weight of his pack and longblaster came down hard on their respective straps, rasping into his flesh on every footfall. The sound of seven pairs of tramping boots was muffled by the mud’s friable crust. Those at the rear of the file fanned out a bit to avoid the dust cloud raised by the runners in front. Even so, Ryan tasted dirt in his mouth, and grit crunched between his teeth.

Nobody said a word.

They were all too busy breathing, struggling to hold position. Chins up, eyes straight ahead, this was a grim, silent race against time, a race against their luck finally running out. To Ryan it felt like a blaster muzzle was pressed hard to the back of his head, a live round chambered, and someone’s finger curled around the trigger.

Any second.

Any nukin’ second the wave of destruction would come, a wave so hot it would scramble the nerves of back and brain, so hot it would feel cold.

And then the black.

Forever.

The end of the parking lot and the line of trees at the edge of the golf course grew steadily closer. What was a safe distance? Who knew? Long minutes passed. Three. Four. Five. At minute four, Ryan’s thighs began to ache; his legs felt like lead. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face and trickled along the middle of his back. By five, everyone was huffing and puffing, even Jak.

After six minutes of all-out sprint, they crossed the ruptured road and reached the start of the golf course.

Ryan hazarded a glance back over his shoulder, to measure the distance they’d come. He guessed it at a little more than seven hundred yards. Before he could face front again, it all went to hell.

There were two almost simultaneous detonations: a relatively small one at the edge of the parking lot on his left shot straight up in the air like a volcanic eruption; the other, an enormous one inside the box store volcanoed and went sideways in all directions. The horizontally spreading blast ring lifted the parking lot mud twenty feet in the air. In a blinding flare of light, the store’s concrete-block walls vanished; and the Winnies disintegrated in the same microsecond. Before Ryan could bat his eye, the larger explosion swallowed up the smaller.

The shock and sound wave struck him in the same instant. He was unprepared for their power; in truth, there was no way to prepare for it. The explosion made the ground fly up and smash him in the face. One moment he was running, the next he was on his stomach, seeing stars and tasting his own coppery blood. He wasn’t alone, everybody was thrown violently to the earth.

As the sound boomed past them, Ryan scrambled to his feet. He heard someone gasping for air.

“Nukin’ hell,” J.B. wheezed as he got up. “I think I cracked a rib.”

Where the predark mall had been, a vast column of roiling dust and smoke uncoiled into the blue sky.

“There’s nothing left of it,” Krysty said in awe. “It’s all gone.”

Not quite true.

Huge chunks of debris from the store began falling through the smoke, clusters of still-joined concrete blocks crashing onto the parking lot. The lighter debris flew even farther from ground zero, as if it had been fired from a catapult. Pieces of asphalt, metal and rock sizzled down around them, bouncing on the grass.

“We need to move farther away!” Ryan said. “Go, Jak! Go!”

They ran deeper into the golf course, out from under the debris fall. J.B. dropped behind at once, cradling his rib cage on the left side. He couldn’t keep up because he couldn’t take a full breath. To run any distance required air. Lots of air. Ryan knew it had to have hurt like holy hell. J.B. was not a groaner by nature, but he groaned with each footfall. Seeing how badly his old friend was banged up, Ryan quickly relieved him of his pack and hung back to jog alongside him.

Jak led them up a familiar rise, through the grove of trees and down the slope to the shore of the chartreuse-matted water hazard.

At the edge of the lake, they all sat, exhausted.

First thing, Mildred had a look at J.B.’s ribs.

“I heard something go snap when I hit the ground,” he told her, holding open his shirt. “It’s hard to breathe deep…”

“You might have cracked one,” she said. “Or maybe it’s just a deep bruise. Either way all I can do is wrap you up to immobilize it.” She pulled a bandage roll from her medical kit and started binding his chest in tight, overlapping turns.

As she was working, the musician lifted his head from between his knees and addressed the one-eyed man. “Where’s the rest of my C-4?” he said.

“Mebbe you’d better explain how you figure it’s yours before we get into whether there’s any more of it,” Ryan told him.

“You want an explanation? Sure, I’ll give you the whole story. I heard about a predark C-4 storage site from a scrounger who’d just come back from the New Mex hot zone. He didn’t know what the fuck he’d stumbled onto. The triple stupe couldn’t read a lick. He thought the packaged kilos might be worth something, though. He came to me with the information and a sample of the stuff because he didn’t trust BoomT to give him an honest deal. I hired a full bike crew to go back to New Mex with him. Took a big risk and staked them gas, food and ammo to go get me a load of plastique. That’s why I’m here with my ship. I skipper a forty-foot sloop, working the coast route up into the Lantic. I’ve been waiting to make the exchange for the explosive, and then to personally deliver it to my buyers.”

“East Coast barons?” Mildred said.

“Nah,” the musician said. “I’m not sailing east with it, I’m sailing west. You ever hear of Padre Island?”

“Rumors,” Krysty said. “Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Grounded freighter, fully loaded, on the southwest edge of the Houston radpit.”

“To be more precise, my dear, what we’ve heard is rumors of rumors,” Doc corrected the tall redhead. “We’ve never actually made the acquaintance of anyone who claimed to have visited that particular garden spot, only people who claimed to know people who claimed they knew people, and so on, and so on. Smoke and mirrors, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“We don’t put much stock in things we haven’t seen for ourselves,” Ryan told the man with the mustache.

“Well, I’ve been there regular, mebbe twenty times total,” the musician countered, “and I’m telling you it’s as real as you and me. The islanders have brand-new predark goods coming out their ears. They’re ready to trade plenty for something this extra special. Once they’ve got it, they’ll cut it up into little chunks and sell it for ten times my price. But hey, that’s business.”

“So if these people are paying you,” Ryan said, “you can pay us.”

“I’ll give you just what I was going to give the coldhearts I hired. I paid them half up front. Promised to pay them half on delivery. I’ll give you the delivery part of what I agreed to.”

Over the man’s shoulder, submerged not thirty feet away, was the disputed stash.

“That isn’t good enough,” Ryan said. “We want half of whatever the islanders are going to pay you.”

“Are you kidding? You want me to make you partners?”

Ryan’s expression said he wasn’t kidding, and that was exactly what he wanted.

“Without us, you’ve got nothing,” Krysty said. “And you’re out all your upfront costs. With us you’ve got fifty kilos of C-4 to trade.”

“So there
is
more of it,” the musician said, a wide smile lifting the corners of his drooping lip shrubbery.

“We need you, and you need us,” Mildred told him. “That’s what partnerships are made of.”

After a moment of consideration, the companions had their answer. “All right,” the musician said, “I’ll admit you’ve got me.”

“We need ammo for our blasters,” Ryan told him. “Nines, .38s, .357s, 9 mm and 12-gauge.”

“Not a problem. I’ve got a good selection of new—not reloaded—cartridges stowed away on my ship. It’s islanders’ ammo, from their stockpile. The bikers were going to take it as part of their pay. You can help yourselves.”

“And you’re taking us with you to Padre,” Krysty declared.

“Of course. We ship together until the deal is finished. Afterward we go separate ways. Now, where’s
our
C-4?”

By way of an answer, Ryan started unlacing his boots. Jak did the same. Then the two of them waded out into the lake to retrieve the sunken treasure.

As they dropped five dripping packs onto the shore, the musician muttered, “Well, fuck me sideways and call me Sally…”

“What
do
people call you?” Mildred asked.