Dark Resurrection (22 page)

Mildred watched the Panamanian coastline glide by: staggered ranks of round-top mountains dark with jungle, and closer in, the brilliant flash of white surf breaking along miles of deserted beaches. Once again the vibration of twin diesels was putting her buttocks to sleep. As much as she could, given the minimal slack in her restraints, she shifted her sitting position on the ship’s deck.

Her four companions, the shitweasel Fire Talker, the three whitecoats and their warrior-priest captors were running north from Panama City, and had been for almost eight hours straight. Their transportation had been upgraded considerably, from horse carts to a thirty-six-foot Bertram sportfisher. Its twin, fuel-injected Caterpillar diesels really put out the power: Mildred estimated their cruising speed at 25 knots or better. It was plenty fast enough to cool off the sweltering air and evaporate the sweat dripping down her face and running under her arms.

The going was actually quite pleasant for a change; this was the easiest part of journey so far. Of course it would’ve been even better if she and the others hadn’t been chained to the rails of the Bertram’s stern deck bait well. There hadn’t been enough room around the well to hook Daniel up alongside them and still guarantee his safety, so he was fastened
about six feet away, to the base of the port outrigger. That was nothing to cry over, either.

The overland crossing of the Panamanian isthmus had been a three-day, two-night ordeal. The two nights were spent in outposts along the old canal route, in secure bunkers built into hillside caves. They were big enough to house a mule train, and they had their own freshwater cisterns. It was still unclear what their captors were afraid of, but their tension escalated as the sun began to set. They pushed the horses hard to reach shelter before nightfall.

Whatever it was the warrior-priests were scared of, it didn’t have the brains or the dexterity to open the bunker doors from the outside between occupations, and thereby lie in wait for the next convoy.

Although Mildred never saw anything moving, the forest on all sides came alive with breaking brush and shrill screams as evening descended. She had to wonder if there were muties in the Panamanian jungle, the same sort of brutal chillers that infested Deathlands. Or were there brand-new ones? Or was the mutie plague limited to the hellscape and the ground plowed and planted by the all-out nuclear exchange? Or had the stickies and scalies of the hellscape just not migrated this far south yet? Lot of questions, no answers.

By unspoken agreement, the companions had begun ditching their food at every meal. The Fire Talker caught them at it on the first day on the trail, but instead of turning them in to the whitecoats, he demanded they give him what they weren’t going to eat themselves. He wasn’t really that desperate for extra rations, but he wanted more drugs, he wanted more oblivion. And the companions gladly accommodated him. It not only got rid of most of the evidence; it shut him up.

On the afternoon of the third day, they had reached the shore of the Pacific. As it turned out, the rupture of the canal’s Pacific-end locks and the outflowing of Miraflores Lake, which was a teacup compared to the artificial reservoir on the Atlantic side, hadn’t devastated Panama City at all. Though its infrastructure had survived the canal’s destruction on skydark more or less intact, Panama City’s population had entirely vanished; as with Colón, the jungle had taken it back.

For different reasons.

Along the fractured, eroding highway on the edge of the city they had seen crude, hand-painted signs. Warning signs that looked weathered, many decades old.

Plaga.

Plague.

Was it the same one that had devastated Padre Island? Mildred wondered. What were the odds of a second, incredibly deadly, unheard-of bioweapon popping up in this neck of the woods?

Slim and none.

The simplest answer was usually the right answer: Occam’s Razor.

The little convoy had continued on, past the warning signs, toward a jagged skyline of towering buildings that framed a placid bay. There was no way of telling whether the disease was still in evidence, but there were definitely dangers of other kinds. As the horse carts rolled along, down a broad, creeper-covered side street Mildred saw a pair of sleek, black jaguars loping along, hunting for dinner. High above them, flocks of noisy scarlet macaw glided between the broken-out windows of high-rise towers.

The companions had spent their third night out of Colón
with a warrior-priest garrison bivouacked in the old Panama City yacht harbor. The yacht basin was either a safe distance from the plague zone of the central city, or the plague had in fact burned itself out. The harbor had been turned into a transit point for small craft shipping, both commercial and passenger. There were a dozen converted pleasure craft moored there, sail and power boats from thirty to sixty-five feet long.

The Matachìn evidently had access to the intact fuel stores of Panama City, and probably enough diesel to last them another hundred years.

Mildred couldn’t be sure whether the introduction of the plague to Panama City had come before or after the bioweapon had been used in Mexico on the Atlantic side. The destruction and loss of life in Panama City had definitely gotten out of control, though. There was no strategic advantage to completely wiping out a population of what had to have been at least a million people. The jungle that had invaded the city had been fertilized by all those rotting corpses.

Killing everyone only complicated the pirates’ conquest: there was no one left to do any of the work, and a disease quarantine put the city’s bounty out of immediate reach. Which led Mildred to believe that this had to have been an earlier deployment of the weapon, perhaps even the first deployment, before the pirates realized the full extent of what it could do, and how fast it could spread. Perhaps the citizens of Panama City had successfully resisted the Matachìn incursions up to that point. Certainly they would have had the sheer numbers to turn back invaders.

For what it was worth, the birds, monkeys and jaguar seemed to be immune to the plague.

During the night they had spent on the waterfront, the Fire
Talker’s ebullient mood, fueled by multiple doses of opiate, had turned suddenly darker. He began talking to himself like a man possessed, using the absurd voices of his absurd characters as they confronted his abusive and long-dead parents.

It made sleep impossible.

Doc had found this particularly irritating. “Have you any idea how grating your ridiculous monologues are becoming?” he demanded of the Fire Talker.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mildred remarked.

When Doc glared at her, she added, “What? What?”

She couldn’t tell whether Doc had completely missed the irony or whether he was affronted by it.

Mildred turned her attention toward the Bertram’s bow as the little whitecoats and one of the warriors escorted Krysty back to the bait well, this after a trip to the salon’s head. While the women “scientists” reattached Krysty’s manacles to the stainless-steel rub rail, the soldier held the muzzle of his submachine gun to the back of her skull. Resistance was impossible.

After their captors returned to the air-conditioned salon, Krysty spoke in hushed tones. “I think I know where they’re taking us. I saw a nautical chart laid out on a table. The course was plotted on a plastic overlay. We’re headed for an island called Coiba.”

“The dictator Noriega used to torture his political prisoners there,” Mildred said. “This was back in the 1980s, before he was overthrown by the U.S. invasion. It was a maximum security prison back then. A prison hidden deep in the jungle. An awful place, by all accounts. They called it the ‘Devil’s Island’ of Panama.”

“So they renamed it Xibalba?” Krysty said.

Mildred tried to recall the myths she’d read about the place so long ago. “I’m pretty sure Xibalba was supposed to be hidden somewhere in Guatemala,” she told the others. “And it was supposed to be belowground, a vast cavern with apartments, palaces, a council place, and rooms with various harrowing trials for visitors. The Lords of Death were supposed to be
humanlike,
whatever that means.”

“Perhaps it refers to bipedalism?” Doc remarked. “Stereoscopic color vision? Opposable thumbs?”

“Who knows?” Mildred said. “It’s just a thousand-year-old folk tale.”

“I know,” Daniel asserted.

They all stared at the man in the net suit. He finally seemed to have stirred from his day-long stupor.

“You’re going to fill us in, now?” J.B. said dubiously.

“Why not, we’re almost there. That dark hump on the horizon is Xibalba.”

“What do you know about it?” Krysty said.

“Before skydark I volunteered for an ultrasecret experiment,” Daniel said. He enunciated his words carefully and slowly; it seemed to take considerable effort to fight off the effects of the opiates. “I didn’t know where I was going or what I was getting into when I signed on. By the time I figured it out, it was too late. The experimentation on Coiba didn’t go as planned. I was infected but I didn’t die—I carried the plague in my blood. I was given a choice by the whitecoats—live out the rest of my life on the island, or go into cryostasis until a cure could be found. When I was reanimated, there was no cure and the Atapuls had been in command of the prison and in command of the Matachìn for close to a century.”

“Who are the Atapuls?” Mildred said.

It took a moment for the sense of the question to sink past the opiate fog. Then Daniel said, “They’re the offspring of convicts who escaped into the island bush. Criminal royalty whose lineage stretches back to before Armageddon. I was in a cryotank on nukeday when escaped prisoners returned from the jungle and took over the prison. I wasn’t the first carrier they reanimated over the years, there were plenty of others to choose from. Like I said, the project was a disaster, start to finish.”

“Why are they bringing you back here now?” Krysty said. “What do they want with the five of us?”

Daniel lowered his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said.

“Tell us, you piece shit!” Jak snarled.

The Fire Talker began to sob weakly into his hands; the sobs rapidly grew further and further apart, until he appeared to slip back into a drugged sleep. There was no rousing him from it.

Mildred turned her attention to the island looming off the starboard bow. Looking at it, she felt no curiosity, no anger, only dread. Coiba was immense, and separated from the mainland by fifty shark-filled miles of ocean. As they got closer, she could make out the shoreline: convoluted blobs of black lava formed sheer cliffs that were crashed by white surf, and topped by a vast, seemingly impenetrable rain forest. There were dots of color scattered here and there among the branches and drooping vines: bright yellow flowers that could have been wild orchids.

A wall of heat hit them as the Bertram glided into a protected cove. Two other pleasure craft—a twenty-eight-foot Aquasport center console and a thirty-two-foot Pursuit—were
moored in close to shore with no crews in sight; the water dropped off steeply from the curve of white sandy beach. The beach was on a finger of land, and on the far side of the land a sluggish green river flowed into the sea. Nibor and his men anchored the boat, then rowed the passengers the short distance ashore in an inflatable dinghy. It took several trips to transfer them all. Although doped to the gills, Daniel came to at the last moment. He had to be dragged screaming from the Bertram. One of the paramilitaries clubbed him into compliance before dumping him into the raft.

The warrior-priests brought their RPDs along with them, and some extra 100-round drum mags. Obviously they considered the intended route to Xibalba as dangerous as the journey across the isthmus.

The reasons for the show of force immediately became apparent. Crocodiles sunned themselves on the riverside of the beach, not thirty yards from their landing site. These creatures were fifteen feet long, and more than a yard across the widest part of their rib cages. The saltwater crocs didn’t seem interested in the visitors. Or perhaps they weren’t within easy enough eating distance.

Nibor and his crew ignored them in return.

With three warrior-priests on point, followed by the companions, the whitecoats, Daniel and a two-man rear guard, they followed the sliver of land to the edge of the forest, then ducked under the rain-forest canopy.

It was smotheringly hot in the deep shade, like a bake oven. The trail was narrow and winding, they had to walk single file. Visibility was no more than ten feet ahead. The jungle off the trail was so thick that escape to either side was impossible. There was nowhere to run.

Dog-face and his crew immediately unsheathed their machetes.

Snakes, Mildred knew, were dispatched with machetes more easily than machine guns, especially in this kind of close quarter.

Even if there weren’t any muties lurking in the deep shadows, there were a thousand other ways to die in this place, all of them excruciating. From the way the warrior-priests clutched their weapons, they felt ambush or attack was likely at any moment.

After they had trekked in about two miles, up and down the sides of steep ravines, waded shallow creeks, and were drenched in sweat, Nibor stopped the advance with a hand signal. The jungle sounds that had surrounded them for more than an hour—the bellows of the howler monkeys and the screeches of the toucans and macaws—had gone suddenly silent. He listened for a moment, then announced to all,
“Los perros vienen.”