Dark Resurrection (27 page)

The baying sounds of the feral dogs rapidly grew louder and more frenzied. They seemed to be coming from three sides as the pack filtered through the jungle, closing in for the kill.

“We can’t wait for sundown,” Ryan said, rising to his feet. “In another five minutes the dogs will have us pinned against the fence. That will alert the Matachìn and then we’ll be attacked front and rear, with no way out. Tom, cut the outside wire here. I’ll take the tower gunner on the right, Chucho you take the other one. Tom, get through the wire as quick as you can. Once the gun towers are dealt with, cross the no-man’s-land and cut us a hole in the inside fence.”

“With the exception of your friends of course,” Chucho said, “everyone inside the compound has earned death. The so-called gods. Their pirate criminals. The whitecoats and dwarves who spread the plague, and the miscellaneous underlings and bootlicks that keep this place running. These creatures have sucked the blood of my people for decades. For that they must pay. And they must never be allowed to rise up again.”

“But we can’t possibly kill them all,” Tom said as he took out the wire cutters. “We can’t cover all the ways out of here. Once we start shooting, they can scatter out the main gate or scale the fence and hightail it off into the jungle.”

“Let them,” Ryan said. “If the dogs don’t run them down,
they will have nothing to come back to here. We’ll make sure of that.”

“We will sink all their boats so they can’t escape from this place,” Chucho added. “Let them try to swim to the mainland or make rafts from the trees. When the first few are eaten by sharks, there will be no more swimmers or rafters, I guarantee you. Once again there will be prisoners for life on this hell island.”

Casacampo stood as if to join them in the next phase of the operation.

“Not you,” Chucho told him.

The commander’s face dropped.

“You die here and now. Before you can betray us.”

“But…”

Chucho’s H&K coughed once in a summary execution. Fragments of Casacampo’s skull and brains splattered the leaves and branches behind them. The body flopped to the ground on its back, arms and legs twitching.

“Shit,” Ryan muttered. He knew the scent of the gore would be a beacon for the dogs. And it would lead them right up to the hole in the fence. But he said nothing about it. It was too late to undo what had been done. The bastard deserved chilling, anyway, no matter whose hand did the deed.

And time was running out.

Ryan hurried away, concealed just inside the edge of the forest, moving parallel to the wire. When he arrived at a point opposite the gun tower, he peered through the dense foliage. The Matachìn in the tower wasn’t looking his way. Under the shade of the tower’s peaked metal roof, he had his back to the perimeter and he was staring down at the goings-on inside the compound.

Ryan crawled to the wire, then bellied down in front of it. He lined up the shot, bracing the silencer’s fat barrel against the mesh. The distance was no more than seventy-five yards. He flipped the fire selector switch to triburst, snugged up the buttstock and acquired the target.

When the tower guard turned his way, Ryan tightened down on the trigger until it broke. The H&K coughed a 3-round stutter and pushed back hard against his shoulder. Downrange, the slap of metal on meat was lost in the steady throb of Xibalba’s generators. The man in the tower threw up his hands.

Not in surprise.

Not in celebration.

In the ultimate surrender.

His body dropped out of sight behind the tower’s front wall.

Ryan scooted back to the forest. No longer concerned about being observed, he sprinted to the gaping cut in the wire. He got there just as Chucho arrived. Both towers were now unmanned. The way in was clear. They slipped through the break in the fence and crossed the stretch of open ground on a dead run.

Tom was ahead of them, already kneeling at the second fence, working like a madman with the cutters. When they reached him, the trader held open the hole he’d made so they could enter.

So far, so good, Ryan thought. Even though it was broad daylight, no one had noticed their penetration. He knew that wouldn’t last.

As the three of them cut across the swathe of open ground toward the two-story cell blocks, someone started shouting at them.

Still there was no armed response. Perhaps because this incursion into the heart of Xibalba was entirely unexpected and unprecedented.

That all changed when four bald-headed pirates suddenly rounded the corner of the cell block, running with weapons up. Chucho and Ryan fired first, at a distance of about eight yards, aiming center chest. The silenced, full-auto bursts blasted the Matachìn off their feet. As they were flung aside, they fired their submachine guns into the air and the ground in front of them.

So much for surprise.

The Xibalban bystanders scattered as Ryan, Chucho and Tom charged around the corner, heading for the rear of the whitecoat building. They didn’t have enough time or enough ammo to take out everyone in sight. Just the combatants. The ones who stood in their way.

Ryan hit the doors first. He burst into a foyer that opened onto a low-ceilinged reception area. A handful of whitecoats stood there, stunned for an instant, then they all dived for cover.

“Krysty, Mildred!” Ryan bellowed down the corridor. “J.B., Doc, Jak! Where are you?”

When there was no answer, he growled at Tom and Chucho, “Let’s start kicking in some doors.”

Ryan found Jak in the second room he tried. The albino was strapped and gagged on a table. Released, he was spitting mad. Not a pretty sight with those bloodred eyes and deathly pale face and hair. He looked like a demon ghost.

Ryan handed him the submachine gun and swung the big Russian MG around on its shoulder sling.

“Fuck ’em up!” Jak snarled. “Let’s fuck ’em up!”

Out in the hallway, Tom and Chucho had found and freed
the others. When Krysty saw Ryan she ran toward him full-tilt, threw herself into his open arms and squeezed him tight. Her emerald eyes shining with tears, she said, “Oh, lover! Oh, Gaia, thank you, thank you!”

“You are a sight for sore eyes, my dear Ryan,” Doc said as he stepped up.

“And we’re seeing double,” Mildred added, nodding at Chucho.

There was no time to get acquainted, or reacquainted. And definitely no time for explanations.

Harmonica Tom opened Ryan’s backpack, reached in and took out a pre-rigged block of C-4. “Where is this going to do the most damage?” he said, hefting the oblong parcel in his hand.

Mildred pointed toward the quarantine section. “That’s where they keep the
enanos
and the plague serum,” she told him. “It’s a triple layer of containment, pressure sealed so the disease can’t accidentally get out. Once that’s gone they’ll never be able to rebuild it. Or make more plague carriers.”

“If we blow it up, won’t we be releasing it?” Krysty said.

“The heat of the explosion will probably destroy it,” Mildred said.

“And even if it doesn’t,” Ryan added, “it’ll be contained on the island. We’re fifty miles from the mainland. When we leave, we’re turning the lights out.”

Ryan took Tom’s H&K and handed it to J.B. There weren’t enough extra weapons to go around. After Tom planted the charge, Ryan said, “Now, let’s go pay a visit to the Lords of Death.”

“They’re probably all holed up in the gym building. Its their council place,” Mildred said. “It’s where they hold au
diences with their toadies. They’ve got big-time backup in there.”

As they exited the research center, bullets slammed into the concrete facade and skipped off the concrete walkway. They were moving too quickly to see where the blasterfire was coming from, and it didn’t matter at that point; their goal was to reach the next bit of solid cover, which was the near wall of the gymnasium.

They ran past assorted sniveling wretches and pus bags who although still smiling to beat the band were wandering around in a daze, not understanding what had happened, or what was about to happen.

“Doors in, doors out?” Ryan asked Mildred.

“Two doors, one at either end,” she said. “There are no other ways out.”

“If they’re in there, we’ve got ’em,” Tom said.

Ryan sent Jak off to the right with extra mags for the H&K, to cover the gym’s rear exit and forestall a retreat in that direction. Then he and the others ran for the building’s main entrance. As they came around the corner, they took fire from the gun tower opposite. Slugs whined overhead, way too close for comfort.

Ryan shouldered the Soviet RPD. “Kick in the doors!” he growled at Chucho and Tom.

When the MG thundered, the recoil set Ryan back on his heels. The 10-round burst punched holes in the wall of the tower, raising a cloud of dust. The gunner disappeared from view.

Behind him, as Chucho and Tom approached the gym’s entrance, a fusillade of blasterfire roared from within, and a ravening volley of bullets came flying through the closed doors.

The rain of outgoing slugs rattled the gym doors in their frames, the ragged, random exit holes making them look like giant cheese graters. Ryan moved closer to the building’s front wall, out of the path of the ricochets. There was no telling how many blasters were cutting loose from the other side, but anyone standing in the doorway or the kill zone beyond it would have been chopped to pieces.

“Let’s give ’em something to think about,” Tom said to Chucho, stepping away from the wall and swinging his RPD up from the hip.

Chucho jumped to his side, then they both let it rip with their machine guns, firing back through the already holed-out doors. Teeth bared, muscular arms shuddering from the sustained buffeting of recoil, they moved to the left as they shot, edging into the killzone, sweeping the interior of the gym with a withering counterfire of 700 steel-jacketed rounds per minute. Spent brass arced from the blasters’ ejector ports, smoke and flame billowed from the muzzles, and the steel-clad doors buckled in the middle and spread apart under the hellacious, close-range barrage.

The last of the two hundred smoking cases clinked to the concrete, and the ear-splitting clatter of the autofire echoed off in the jungle.

There was no return fire.

Ryan and J.B. stepped up and simultaneously booted the crumpled doors, and they crashed inward to the floor.

While Tom and Chucho reloaded their RPDs with fresh drum mags, Ryan and J.B. burst through the doorway with their autoweapons at hip level. Wreaths of gunsmoke hung over the middle of the court. The floor between the old free throw lines was littered with bodies and blood. The Xibalba hangers-on and minor demons had taken the brunt of the exchange of firepower. Some of them still stirred, albeit feebly. It was impossible to tell which side had fired the bullets that cut them down.

At opposite end of room, the exit doors slammed back, and bald Matachìn put up scattered covering fire as they retreated.

J.B. and Ryan fanned out, firing as they advanced. Ryan ran for the end of the bleachers. He could see the top two rows were occupied—large figures in white robes with hideous head masks—but the spectators weren’t moving and they weren’t armed. For the moment they could be ignored.

There were other fish to fry.

Unmanacled for the first time in a month, and now fully armed, J.B. was all about getting payback—with interest. Fearless in his fury, J.B. charged the exit, spraying it with 9 mm slugs. He took down three of the pirates before they could clear the doors, sending them sprawling to the floor. A fourth Matachìn tried to return fire and cover his own escape, and for his trouble, he took two rounds through the throat. He dropped his weapon and clutched his spurting neck in both hands as he slipped to his knees.

Ryan braced his RPD against the edge of a bleacher seat and punched out a stream of hot lead at the last three pirates
who raced for the exit. The torrent of 7.62 mm rounds were like a flyswatter to flies. They lifted and slammed the running men into the concrete block, and as their bodies slumped to the floor they revealed big splotches of red splatter on the wall behind.

Shooting erupted from outside the gym. The retreating Matachìn had stumbled into Jak’s ambush.

The battle sounded one-sided. Because Lauren’s weapon was silenced, only the pirate return fire could be heard.

Then the shooting abruptly stopped.

The pirates had either chilled Jak, or they were all dead. Knowing the albino teen as he did, Ryan was guessing it was the latter. He turned his attention and the sights of his weapon on the two rows of spectators above.

“Get your hands up!” he shouted, forgetting in the heat of the moment that there might be a language barrier.

Chucho repeated the order in Spanish.

None of the seated figures moved a muscle.

“Those are the Lords of Death,” Mildred said as she, Doc and Krysty joined them at the foot of the stands. “The rulers of Xibalba.”

Ryan did a quick head count. Thirty of them. But there were holes in the ranks. Six places were empty.

“How come the masked assholes aren’t moving?” J.B. asked as he slapped a fresh 9 mm mag into his submachine gun and flipped the actuator, chambering the first round. “Are they already dead? Or are they stuffed?”

“We should check to see if any of them are real,” Mildred said.

“Yeah, I’ll
check
them, all right,” Chucho said, hoisting up the muzzle of his RPD. Without another word, he stitched
steel-jacketed slugs across the top rows of bleachers, spraying the figures with autofire. The white-robed torsos jerked, then toppled over. Garish masks rolled off headless shoulders and bounced down the tiers of bleacher seats to the court below.

They were all dummies.

“Nukin’ hell!” J.B. exclaimed. “The bastards got away!”

“Over here!” Jak shouted from the back door.

While Ryan, J.B., Chucho and Tom ran to join him, Doc, Mildred and Krysty took a moment to bend and pick up dropped submachine guns off the dead Matachìn. They immediately checked for full mags and made sure live rounds were chambered.

Everybody had a blaster.

Looking out the doorway, Ryan could see the bodies of half a dozen bushwhacked pirates caught by Jak’s opening silenced burst.

“Pinned me quick, couldn’t nail all,” the albino said ruefully. He pointed at the entrance to the cell block on the other side of a narrow courtyard. “In there.”

“How many?” Tom said.

“Ten, mebbe more.”

“And the Lords of Death?” Ryan prompted. “Did you see them?”

“Already high-tailin’, before camou fighters came out back door,” Jak said. “Five, six motherfuckers in masks, run fast. Ryan, not see anyone
that
fast.”

“They duck into the cell block, too?” J.B. asked.

“Nah, lit out for fence behind. Went through hole.”

“Same fucking hole I cut!” Tom said.

“Out into the jungle by now,” Ryan said. “Were they armed?”

“Nope. Empty hands.”

“If they went out the way we came in they’ll run right into the wild dogs,” Chucho said. “That works for me.”

“Me, too,” Ryan said.

“Are you gonna blow up the council place?” Krysty asked Tom.

The trader eyed the structure dubiously. “Probably take most of the C-4 to bring it down,” he said. “But it rains a lot here, doesn’t it?”

Chucho nodded. “Rains like holy hell.”

“Got enough extra C-4 to blow out a supporting wall and bring down the roof,” Tom said. He quickly removed a pair of charges from Ryan’s backpack and placed them at corners of the facing wall.

As he rejoined Ryan and the others, with a loud crack a single bullet zinged in from the direction of the cell blocks. It clipped the edge of the steel doorframe, sending sparks and bits of metal flying.

“Let’s finish this job,” Ryan said.