Dark Resurrection (28 page)

Following Mildred out of the gym, Harmonica Tom had the rear guard on the file. Ryan was on point as they crossed the courtyard on a dead sprint, making for the cell block’s doors. To their right was a low, windowless, shedlike building.

Another gun crack rang out and a slug from overhead kicked up the dirt. A narrow miss for Ryan, the bullet zipped over his shoulder and hit the ground beside Jak’s left boot. Tom noted that the one-eyed warrior didn’t even flinch. However, the sniper on the cell block roof forced them to change course to the right, moving up against the maintenance shed and under the eaves of its sloping roof.

As Tom was brushing past the shed’s closed door, it jolted mightily in its frame. Heavy bodies hurled against the inside of the metal door, trying to break it down. Claws scraped its surface, trying to rip through it. This was accompanied by a chorus of baritone snarling.

“The Xibalbans call it Jaguar House,” Mildred told him.

“Since when do jaguars bark and howl?” the trader remarked.

“Yeah, that’s what I said. The truth is they’ve got a bunch of feral dogs trapped in there and they use them to torture their subjects, and to keep them in line. If you go in Jaguar House, you don’t come out in one piece. You don’t come out at all.
The smell of blood and the sound of gunfire has really got the dogs worked up.”

“They smell dinner,” Tom said.

Another single shot rang out from the roof and the bullet whizzed by Tom’s left ear. The trader raised his machine gun to his shoulder, stepped out from beside the building and away from the narrow band of concealment its eaves provided. The others needed covering fire to cross the rest of the courtyard; aside from that, Tom didn’t take kindly to slugs coming that close to his mustache. He touched off a rattling burst of autofire, aimed upward, at the edge of the roof. The lip of mildewed concrete disintegrated under the hail of lead, chunks fell away and dropped to the ground. Tom stopped shooting and waited, sights held steady on the roof line, while the others raced out from under cover for the front of the cell block. When the shooter peeked up with his weapon about five feet from where Tom thought he’d be, he shifted his aim to the target and pinned the trigger. The concrete was turned to dust by a dozen steel-jackets. The shooter fell back out of sight and his long blaster tumbled down the side of the building, crashing to the dirt below.

When Tom reached the front of the cell block, Ryan said, “We’re going to have to blow the door. It’s locked from the inside.”

“No problem,” Tom said. He unshouldered his backpack and from it took out a hunk of plastique already rigged with a blasting cap and a length of conventional fuze cord. He worked quickly, mashing the pliable explosive into the gap between the door hinges and frame, then he lit the fuze with a wooden match.

The others had spread out along the foot of the wall,
kneeling with their heads turned toward the building. Tom joined in the duck and cover.

The explosion rocked the ground and sent a plume of smoke and debris flying out into the courtyard.

Mebbe a bit too much C-4, Tom thought as he shook his head to clear it. The door frame was emptied but there were wide, branching cracks running up the side of the cell block’s wall.

When Ryan led them inside, smoke was still pouring out the opening. The floor of the corridor was alive with small, flopping black things.

Bats.

Dying bats and already dead ones.

When Tom entered last, there were still some of the leaping critters to kick aside. He looked down the central corridor. In the light of electric bulbs, filtered through smoke, it was grim, gray, decaying. A different sort of prison than the ancient fort in Veracruz, more temporary, less eternal. Instead of an oppressively low, stone ceiling, the cell block had a towering, two-storey height. But the stink of death and damnation was the same. There were four metal stairways at each corner of the narrow rectangle, each leading up to the second tier of cells and a railed walkway that completely encircled it.

Nothing moved in front of them or above them.

But there were sounds coming out of the smoke and dust, moans of agony.

At Ryan’s signal, they split up, four to a side of the firstfloor cells.

Tom and Chucho held back a little, covering the second-tier walkway on the opposite side with their machine guns, while Mildred and Jak advanced ahead of them, checking the cells.

Across the corridor, Krysty, J.B., Doc and Ryan were doing the same, advancing with caution but with focused intent.

Tom could see the set to their jaws, the hard light in their eyes. It made him smile. All the evil that had been done by the Matachìn and their puppetmasters couldn’t be undone, but it could be stopped, once and for all. This was his true element: blood and blastersmoke and a world of hurt for the coldheart bastards.

They passed cell doors ajar. Inside the barred cages directly opposite the doorway, prisoners or lackeys lay dead on the floor, either blown apart by the blast or chilled by flying shrap. Some of them had daggers of metal sticking out of their torsos and heads.

Then the live ones showed up. Dozens of minor demons and toadies burst from the cells in front of them and charged through the smoke. Waving their arms, male and female, half naked, their faces horror shows of botched surgeries and rictus grins, bleeding from eyes, ears and noses, they yelled and shrieked blue murder.

They were short of stature, carried no firearms, but they made up for that in sheer numbers and kill frenzy.

Tom and Chucho held their fire as a 9 mm crossfire from the others chewed up and spit out the attackers. The unsilenced weapons that Mildred, Doc and Krysty had commandeered clattered earsplittingly in the concrete box. Like the bats, the bootlicks flopped and thrashed around on the floor as they died. Unlike the bats, the blood volume their wounds released was fairly spectacular.

Tom unslung his backpack and pitched a few primed and prepped plastique charges into the empty cells. Across the corridor, Ryan was doing the same thing to the cages opposite.
Then both men reshouldered their packs and picked up their RPDs and continued on.

Down the row, J.B. chucked a spent mag on top of the still-twitching bodies and as he cracked in a fresh one he shouted up at the second tier, “Is that all you bedwetters have got?”

The challenge resounded through the prison.

Though they couldn’t understand English, the Matachìn got the drift and took up the gauntlet at once.

Autofire rained down from the tier above, in the enclosed space the concentrated roar was mind-numbing. Slugs cratered the concrete floor, sending bits of lead and rubble in all directions.

The walkway offered no concealment and no protection for the shooters. It had holes in it for traction, which could be seen through. Behind the muzzle-flashes were bald-headed men who fired bursts over the railing, then ducked back.

Tom, Chucho and Ryan aimed their MGs at the undersides of the walkway, at the moving shadows, and returned fire.

Pirates above them crumpled, falling over the railing, cartwheeling and smashing into the corridor floor.

The survivors retreated down the rectangle of walkway, to the farthest end of the cell block.

The shooting petered out; the echoes died away.

“The way things stand, this isn’t going to end well,” Ryan said.

Tom had to agree. They were looking at a stalemate until one side or the other ran out of ammo. Chances were, the good guys would come up empty first.

“Chucho and I can take the rear stairways,” Tom said. “We can rush them from both sides of the walkway. While we’re
keeping them busy, the rest of you can charge the stairs at the far end.”

Ryan nodded. “We’ll hold off until you open up.”

When Tom and Chucho reached the back of the cell block, the spot where they had to part company, Chucho said, “I think we can get them all, but you’ve got to wait until I start shooting.”

“Done,” Tom said.

He went up one staircase and Chucho went up the other. Concealed from view, they moved low and fast along the walkway, close to the cells. Tom could see a wall behind the Matachìn position at the far end, and at the center, the top of a doorway. He saw movement, too. Seven or eight pirates crouched well back from the railing.

Across the open space, Chucho was in position on the opposite walkway, kneeling with his RPD shouldered.

Tom crept a little closer, then raised his weapon.

Whether the Matachìn sensed they were about to come under full frontal attack, or whether they just decided it was time to make their move to harder cover, they all straightened and turned for the door.

Someone spoke at that end of the hall, clear as a bell, in Spanish. The big bald-headed pirate in charge paused with his hand on the doorknob and looked back, puzzled.

Then Chucho popped up and let it rip.

Tom did the same, rising as he fired, and advancing on the targets.

The double stream of slugs chopped the Matachìn down in their tracks. Not one returned fire, not one made it through the door. They died on the walkway, a few feet from safety.

Ryan and the others started charging up the staircases, but it was all over.

“What happened?” Tom asked Chucho. “Why did they stop?”

Chucho’s eyes glittered. “A little trick I picked up.”

From behind Tom a familiar voice said in English, “Wait! It’s a trap!”

Tom turned his head to look; he couldn’t help it. When he turned back, Chucho was laughing. “Well, nuke me if that ain’t a trick and a half,” Tom said.

Ryan saw the partially open door and said, “Better check in there. Blasters up.” He kicked the door back and entered with Tom right on his heels. The windowless room was deserted, but it wasn’t empty.

There were beds, a sink, a flush toilet, countertops, and it was crammed with stuff. At one end of a table cluttered with other objects, on an open blanket lay an assortment of weapons. Familiar weapons.

A scoped longblaster.

A SIG-Sauer pistol.

A pump action 12-gauge.

Revolvers.

And an antique blaster.

Tanner made a beeline for his Civil War treasure. He pulled out the LeMat and checked the nipples and wadding. “Just the way I left it,” he said, strapping the holstered weapon around his waist.

The others hurriedly reclaimed their hardware. Like Doc, they made sure everything was in good working order.

“What is this room?” J.B. asked.

“Mebbe a warden’s or guards’ quarters, back in the day,” Ryan said.

“Have a look at this,” Krysty said, waving the others over to the overloaded counter along one wall. In an array of
covered plastic containers there were viscous-looking pastes: brown, green, golden-yellow. She popped one of the lids and sniffed. “Gaia!” she gasped, holding it at arm’s length. “That is just awful.”

“What is it?”

“I have no clue,” Krysty said. “But if smells could kill…”

“This is interesting, too,” Doc said, holding open a fat, spiral-bound notebook. “Perhaps you can make sense of it, Mildred. It is beyond me.”

Tom looked over Mildred’s shoulder as she scanned the open pages. He had never seen anything like it.

“Could be Sanskrit,” Mildred said, flipping pages.

“Chicken scratching, you mean,” Tom said.

Then she came to a series of hand-drawn diagrams or schematics.

“These look like chemical formulas,” Mildred said. “But there are symbols here for elements that don’t exist, or at least I’ve never heard of.”

“Mebbe it’s a kid’s game,” J.B. suggested.

“No kids here,” Jak said.

“The symbology is too consistent for it to be something like that,” Mildred went on. “Some of it almost makes sense, mathematically. If this is biochem, it’s not like anything I ever learned.”

“Where did it come from?” Krysty said.

Mildred shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Who knows and who cares?” J.B. said with growing impatience. “If none of us can read it, it might as well be flies on dog shit.”

He had a point.

After the room and the second tier were mined with C-4, Tom said, “I think we’re ready to blow this dump to hell.”

“Not quite yet,” Mildred corrected him. “First we’ve got to destroy the freezies who haven’t been reanimated. As long as they can be resurrected, so can the plague weapon.”

“Blow them up, too,” Tom said.

“Not necessary,” Mildred told him. “All we have to do is pull the plugs on their cryo tanks and they’ll start to thaw out. Without a computer regulating the defrosting, their bodies will turn to icy slunk and then rot in the heat.”

Though the grounds were still crawling with terrified but smiling bootlicks, they found the entrance to the Cold House unguarded. Tom, the companions and Chucho just walked in and made themselves at home. Along the back wall was a row of stainless-steel cylinders, practically floor-to-ceiling high, and twice as wide as fifty-five-gallon drums, each with its own set of LCD readout monitors and massive, armored power conduits.