Dark Resurrection (10 page)

A lesser man than Ryan Cawdor, a man who feared eternal damnation, might have seen his last night on Earth as a preview of hell’s coming attractions. The blistering, hammering heat. The pall of sulfurous yellow light thrown from widely spaced electric bulbs. The gut-wrenching melange of decomposition odors. The carpets of rats merrily scampering down the corridor. The sounds of human beings in agony, cursing, moaning, praying. The slow trickle of time passing.

Ryan watched his double sleep, as naked as a baby, on the damp stone floor. The rats gave their cell a wide berth. There were plenty of other, easier meals to be had. For his part, Ryan didn’t sleep at all. He didn’t even try.

The man of action was forced into inaction, into introspection. There was nothing he could do about his predicament, except to wait for it to play out. He fought down the urge to pace the bars like a wild animal, this to burn off pent-up energy. He wanted to reserve his strength right up to the end, even though he knew it was possible, if not likely, that he would die without being able to put up a fight. He never imagined it would come down to something like that. But then again, he never really thought about how he’d end up being chilled. His attitude had always been: why bother? His whole adult life he’d dealt with shit as it flew at him, without
worrying about what might happen the next day, or even the next minute. He was into the brown up to his chin now. On his own, unarmed, vastly outnumbered, in chains, and imprisoned, the chances were damn good that this was the one nasty scrape he wasn’t going to walk away from.

During the seemingly endless night, Ryan thought about his son Dean, stolen and lost now perhaps forever, never to be reunited with him. He thought about Krysty and the companions. The people he loved more than anything. He also thought about all the nameless, faceless others he’d chilled, and the legend of violence he was leaving behind. He knew that no matter his intent or the circumstances, he’d be remembered in the Deathlands only by the height of the pile of corpses he’d created.

After uncountable hours had passed, when Chucho finally stirred from sleep, Ryan said to him, “If there’s no lock you can’t pick, how about opening my cuffs and the cell door?”

“Wouldn’t do you any good,” Chucho replied as he stretched his arms over his head. “There’s only one way in and out of here, and to get past it, you’d have to whip the twenty armed red sashes that guard this place. Before you could do that, they’d call for reinforcements from the fort. You’d never see daylight again. And right now that’s my only goal. I’ve been locked away in this fuck hole for weeks now. I want to see the sun, to feel it on my face one more time before I die.”

“You’re not giving up?”

“Didn’t say that. Our best chance is going to come after nightfall, when we’re transported from here to the place of execution. They don’t have enough red sashes to control the entire route. If we can break through their ranks and make it into the crowds, we’ve got a slim hope of getting out of this.”

“Need our hands and feet free to do that,” Ryan said. “Assuming you can pick the locks on my cuffs, what about yours? They’re welded shut.”

Chucho turned away for a few seconds. When he turned back, he held the empty cuffs by their connecting chain on a fingertip. “You mean these?” he said.

His wrists and the backs of his hands glistened in the electric light.

Effortlessly, Chucho popped the cuffs back on. “Rat fat,” he explained. “The slipperiest
mierda
on the planet.”

At once Ryan felt a great weight come off his shoulders. If they could both get out of this hell pit, if they could both get free, they could at least go down fighting instead of being butchered like hogs.

Ryan heard the sounds of distant boots scraping on the stone floor. The noises got louder; they were coming their way.

“They’re bringing us a hot breakfast, right?” Ryan said.

Chucho laughed. “If you want
desayuno
in this place, you’ve got to catch and kill it yourself.”

Twelve red sashes lined up in the corridor outside their cell. They stood an arm’s length from the bars. They weren’t carrying food, but they didn’t come empty-handed, either. Four of them held nooses on poles.

A fifth man, who was apparently in charge, shoved a folded length of cloth through the bars to Chucho. After stepping back out of reach, he growled an order to Ryan’s mirror image.

“The size of my
culebra
makes these pin-dick red sashes and priests nervous,” Chucho said, flashing his white teeth as he wound the material around his waist, covering his nakedness almost to his knees.

The other seven red sashes raised their side-by-side scatterguns
as the head guy unlocked the cell’s iron door. After the prisoners were made to kneel on the floor, the noose-bearers entered and securely collared them, front and rear.

As they worked, Ryan sensed that the guards, despite numbers and firepower, were not all that confident in their advantage. They seemed nervous, and he could smell the rank fear in their sweat. Under the circumstances, Ryan had expected the keepers to be more arrogant, more dismissive. Perhaps contemptuous. But they were none of those things. They were walking on eggshells.

He and Chucho were led slowly from the cell. A red sash in front and one behind controlled each of them with the poles and the airway-closing tension of their integral garrotes. The rest of the escort didn’t bracket the two prisoners. All ten red sashes walked on Ryan’s left, which gave them a clear firing lane and a stone wall for a pellet-and-splatter backstop. As Ryan and Chucho advanced, hobbled hand and foot, and collared, twenty shotgun barrels were aimed at them.

A mobile firing squad.

Their excess of caution made Ryan crack a half smile. He certainly didn’t want to die, but if he had to take the last train west, he’d be proud to check out beside a man who could instill such unreasoning, pants-pissing terror in these assholes.

The entourage gradually spiraled up from the bowels of the ravelin. There were no stairs to climb, just a slight, gradual grade in the floor. The only sounds were the steady scrape of boot soles and the rhythmic clanking of ankle chains.

Then a string of words growled in Spanish echoed down the corridor. Quite loud and distinct, they seemed to come from the rear of the firing squad escort.

The only phrase Ryan could understand and translate was
“Su mama…”

Your mother…

Without a preamble of shoving or warning shouts, two of the red sashes immediately dropped their shotguns and started throwing punches at each other’s heads.

The procession’s advance faltered, then halted. The red sash leader looked around stunned as under a bare bulb full-power blows landed and straw hats went flying. Before anyone could intervene, the two combatants were rolling around on the puddled floor, hands around throats, trying to strangle the life from each other.

The leader bellowed a command and four of the red sashes slung their double-barrels and set to pulling the fighters apart.

Chucho laughed out loud at the show, thoroughly amused by it. He winked at Ryan with his one good eye and said, “Good trick, yes?”

Ryan had to admit it was that.

After a brief scuffle with the peacemakers, the two still-furious men were hauled to their feet. Their faces were bloodied, shirts torn, sashes askew and cowboy hats crumpled. The clearly aggravated red sash leader stationed one of them at the head of the line, the other at the end, then ordered the column to proceed.

Ryan and Chucho were marched through the ravelin’s foyer, out the prison’s only exit, into the heat and blazing light of the semitropics. From the height of the sun overhead, Ryan figured it had to be close to midmorning already. The red sashes lined up along the fort’s ramparts sent up a round of raucous cheers when they appeared. Ryan heard music and drumming coming from that direction, as well.

The procession crossed the bridge over the deep canal that separated the ravelin and the fort. Looking in both directions down the sheltered waterway, Ryan glimpsed crowds of people gathered on the mainland, wildly waving colored pennants and juking giant heads on sticks up and down.

They entered the fort through the door of the cylindrical guardhouse, passed under the massive ramparts and stepped out into the broad compound-parade ground. To the left, on an elevated platform at the far end of the enclosure, the priests were indeed wearing their judge hats: tall, red cones with a matching, glittering fringe that hung down over their faces past their chins like curtains of perpetually spurting blood. They were also doing what Ryan assumed was their special judge dance—weaving serpentine, spiraling, shuffling, while beating on tambourines with what looked like polished human long bones. They were accompanied by an eight-piece band made up of accordion, fiddle, trumpet and congas.

Dressed in a gold-epauletted, white military tunic, the breast laden with rows of bright medals and matching white trousers, Fright Mask oversaw the festivities from a throne behind the judge dancers.

Ryan and Chucho were force-marched to the edge of the dais and there, thanks to the leverage provided by the noose poles, made to kneel in the sun in front of the judges and the governor-general of Veracruz.

Their submission proclaimed the final victory of the Lords of Death.

The red sash audience looking down from the battlements on three sides of the compound absolutely ate it up, yelling, whistling and hooting. Some even fired their shotguns in the air. Ryan could see the sun flashing off the bottles that were
being passed around. The red sashes were getting drunk in the middle of the morning on this very special occasion.

After a few minutes the music and awkward dancing stopped, and the spider priest stepped to the edge of the platform, raised his arms to silence the crowd, then unleashed a lengthy preamble, his voice an odd singsong, like a ritual chant.

“What’s he saying?” Ryan asked his twin.

Chucho didn’t bother to translate the words verbatim. “It’s just the usual bullshit,” he said. “Itzamna, the head priest, is thanking the Lords of Death for the opportunity to serve them by publicly trying and executing their sworn, ancient enemies from the beginning of time. Namely, you and me.”

After another short musical and dance interlude, the spider priest got down to business.

As the lesser priests took their seats on either side of Fright Mask, Itzamna read from a scroll. When he paused after a moment, the other judges beat on their tambourines with the stripped, polished leg bones. This was accompanied by cheers and hoots from the red sash mob. Then the head priest resumed reading. Every time he paused in the oration, the judges hit their tambourines, and the crowd went wild.

“He’s listing the charges against us,” Chucho informed Ryan. “And then the rest of the priests are voting guilty or not guilty. Beating on the drums means guilty.”

“Figured that much,” Ryan said. “I want to know what I’m dying for.”

“We are accused of disemboweling priests and strangling them with their own guts,” Chucho translated. “I only did that once, and I was sorely provoked. We are accused of burning churches to the ground after trapping priests and red sashes inside. Yeah, did that. Blowing up red sash garrisons. Poisoning
wells in garrisons. Robbing treasure and payroll caravans. Destroying oil pipelines and a small refinery. Inciting mob violence and rebellion in that mining ville I told you about.”

“You did all that, too?”

Chucho grinned.

“What about me?” Ryan said. “What are they accusing me of?”

“Well, since we’re the Hero brothers it’s sort of a two-for-one thing. You are the
dzul
twin. The white twin. I’m the
indio,
the dark one. Guilt by association, though we’re perfect strangers.”

“So everything you did to these bastards, I’m getting the blame for?”

“Pretty much. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. If I’d known about any of this, I’d have done the same as you. Mebbe a lot worse.”

As the head priest prattled on, the listed crimes became more and more arcane, both philosophically and metaphysically. Even when translated by Chucho they were unintelligible to Ryan because he couldn’t understand the terminology and complex mythological references: White Bone Snake, Black Transformer, Maize God…. It didn’t matter what the hell they meant, according to Chucho, because every crime on the list was punishable by death.

The full charges against them took the better part of twenty minutes to read. No surprise, the verdicts were all guilties, punctuated by applause and volleys of shotgun blasts from the surrounding ramparts. Then the head priest recited a last bit from the very end of the scroll, which was further cause for celebration.

“How are we going to be punished?” Ryan said. “How are they going to execute us? Did the priest talk about that?”

“That’s what all the noise is about,” Chucho replied. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“I don’t plan on being around when it’s supposed to happen,” Ryan said. “I’m just curious about what they have in mind.”

“It’ll be big fun for the priests, but not so much fun for us,” his twin assured him. “First, they’ll strip us naked in front of all the
Jarochos
down in the
Zócalo,
then they’ll stick quills through our
culebras
to draw out the sacred blood for fire sacrifice. After burning our blood they’ll hang us by the neck from the lighthouse parapet, and revive us. They’ll do that a few dozen times, until they or the crowd gets bored, whichever comes first. After that, they’ll chop off our arms and legs and cauterize the stumps so we don’t bleed out. Then they’ll cut off our male parts and fry them in hot lard right under our noses. When that’s done, they’ll open our bellies and yard out our guts.”