Dark Resurrection (13 page)

From the depths of the sweltering dungeon came the chant “Chu-cho, Chu-cho, Chu-cho.” On the eve of the execution of Ryan’s double, the other prisoners were saluting him. There were no red sash guards wandering the corridors to make them shut up. Nobody cared what they said or what they did inside the squalor of their cavelike cells. They were already ghosts.

But they were passionate ghosts.

And their standard-bearer was about to take the last train west.

Then the chanting turned to spirited singing and clapping. Ragged, off-key, out-of-time, the rousing, oompah-pah ballad echoed through the half darkness. Ryan could pick out his cell mate’s name in the refrain, over and over again.

“What’s all that about?” Ryan asked.

“It’s the story of my very first revenge against the priests and red sashes put to music,” Chucho replied.

“Touching.”

Chucho shrugged. “They are my people and they love me, but they don’t really know me. They only know my legend, the myth I created. They are in love with a man I fashioned out of smoke.”

“Sounds like you did a hell of a job.”

“No, it wasn’t me who made it happen,” Chucho said. “My people gave it substance because they needed so badly for it to be true. We have endured far too much, for far too long at the hands of the Atapul dynasty. I supplied the hope, they put the flesh on it and pumped it full of blood.”

Gradually the strains of the song lost steam and faded away. Though the dungeon’s background noises returned to scattered moans and screams for help, and pleas for a merciful death, there were occasional shouts of Chucho’s name and “Viva!”

Ryan figured they’d been back in the cell five or six hours, which meant it had to be getting on to evening outside. His thoughts returned to Krysty, J.B., Doc, Mildred and Jak, dragged off to who knew where, for who knew what. He and the companions had been separated before, and by even greater distances and obstacles. But never as prisoners. Always one or the other had had their freedom and room to operate.

Under the circumstances how lost, how vulnerable would they be without him? Could they pull it together aboard ship to escape and save themselves? Ryan felt an uncomfortable twinge of doubt. The Matachìn were not only accustomed to handling slaves, they had made a science out of it, using restraints, starvation and physical and mental exhaustion, and a minimum number of enforcers to get the job done. Their method left no wiggle room whatsoever. In the three weeks the companions had been captives at sea, there hadn’t been a single moment when the tables could have been turned. Ryan flat out didn’t know if his friends could survive, let alone find a way to free themselves. And the not-knowing sat like a ten-pound cannonball in the pit of his stomach.

Chucho nudged him with an elbow and broke his unhappy train of thought.

Ryan’s double produced a sliver of bone about two inches long. “Let me see to your shackles,” he said.

“If you take them off me now, the red sashes are bound to notice.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll show you.”

With deft flicks of the pick, Chucho unlocked Ryan’s wrist and ankle cuffs. The manacles dropped with a clank to the damp stone floor. For the first time in weeks Ryan was able to take a stride longer than two feet. He paced the width of the cell, stretching his legs.

“Now we have to put them back on.”

Chucho lifted the hem of the cloth wrapped around his waist and teased out a bunch of the four-foot-long threads. He closed the cuffs back around Ryan’s ankles and secured them in that position with winds of thread that in the dim light were almost invisible. Outside, at night, they would be invisible. Chucho did the same with the wrist cuffs. “When you want the shackles to come off,” he told Ryan, “just pull the chains between them tight and the threads will break. Be careful, though, don’t stretch the chains too much when they’re walking us out of here. We don’t want them to fall away before we’re ready to make our move.”

Ryan heard distant boots scraping on the stone floor, headed their way. Then the prisoners started yelling, stamping their feet and rattling their bars. It sounded like feeding—or breeding—time at a mutie zoo.

“Are they coming for us now?” Ryan said.

Chucho smiled and shook his head. “No, the red sashes are bringing the condemned their last meal. Our fellow prisoners can smell the goodies. That’s why they are making such a fuss.”

“Must smell pretty damn good, then.”

“Compared to raw rat butt hole, anything smells good.”

Four red sashes approached the outside of the cell. One held a pair of big ceramic bowls; one held a pair of glass bottles; two carried scatterguns. The gunners poked their shouldered weapons through the bars, giving the food-bearers cover as they opened the door and set the meal on the floor.

Ryan did a visual inventory from the far side of the cell: whole roasted chickens, potatoes, maybe tomatoes, some other vegetables, and beakers of something red to drink, probably wine.

After leaving the food within reach, the red sashes backed out of the cell and relocked the door. They didn’t stick around to watch the condemned eat. They left without uttering a word.

Ryan could smell the food from ten feet away, and it smelled wonderful. He wasn’t the only one who caught wind of it. As soon as the food-bearers took their leave, rats came hipping and hopping down the corridor. First in ones and twos, then in dozens. They milled anxiously just beyond the bars, wanting to rush in and have it, but they were afraid of the light and the prisoners inside.

Ryan hadn’t eaten for a very long time. He hadn’t eaten well for even longer. He made a beeline for the food before the rats summoned up the necessary courage. With his bare hands he ripped a leg and thigh from one of the chicken carcasses and with the juices running down his forearm was about to stuff most of it into his mouth when Chucho stopped him with a hand.

“Don’t eat it,” he said.

“Because they spit in it?” Ryan countered. “Who gives a damn?”

“Not spit.”

“Piss? Who cares?” Ryan tried to raise the chicken to his mouth, but Chucho stopped him again.

“No,” Chucho insisted.

“Come on, you’re not telling me they shit in it!”

“No, they added
las opiatas. Morfina.
Drugs to make us weak as kittens. So we don’t try to escape and so we don’t fight so hard when they torture us.”

“I figured they’d want us screaming in pain,” Ryan said, tossing the untouched chicken back into the bowl in disgust. “Screaming is always a big crowd pleaser.”

“Oh, we would still scream,” Chucho assured him. “We’d scream our heads off. The drugs don’t stop a person from feeling pain. You still feel everything they do to you. You just can’t do anything about it. It makes the victims easier for the executioners to deal with, to move around. Like meat puppets with lungs.”

Chucho used a foot to nudge the bowls even closer to the bars, until they were actually touching them. Then he backed away. He motioned for Ryan to move with him to the rear of the cell.

Sensing their opportunity, the bravest of the rats moved in. At first they stuck their heads between the bars, nibbling furtively over the rims of the bowls. Those who were edged out grew bolder and entered the cell to get an open spot at the troughs. In a minute or two, they were eating in a competitive frenzy and their fellows, in droves, were scampering down the corridor to join them.

Chucho signaled Ryan to wait, to have patience.

It didn’t take long. All of a sudden one of the feeding rats did a two-foot back flip, landed belly up with its legs and tail twitching feebly.

It was ignored by the others, and a new rat quickly moved in to take the empty place.

Ryan watched as rats started falling over, one by one. The growing mass of the fallen didn’t stop those behind from sampling the food. Soon the bowls and a surrounding section of stone floor were covered by a pile of furry unconscious bodies.

Laughing, Chucho approached ground zero, which sent the still hungry survivors scurrying out of the cell and down the hall. He started gathering up the rats, two by two. Using threads from his garment he securely tied their tails together, and then flipped them back out in the corridor. He worked quickly, giving the impression this was not the first time he had pulled the trick.

“When they wake up, won’t they be surprised?” he said to Ryan as he cinched his knots tight, making a critter with eight legs and two heads, legs and heads pointing in the opposite direction. “They won’t be able to bite their tails off to escape. To get away they’ll try to kill one another. If one of them succeeds, it will have to drag the corpse of the other behind it.”

Ryan didn’t say anything. It seemed like a lot of effort for a childish joke. Mebbe it was a cultural thing. Mebbe Chucho really hated rats.

Once again other prisoners started calling to their hero from the darkness down the hallway.

Ryan couldn’t understand what they were saying and his double didn’t translate. Ignoring the unintelligible back and forth, he asked Chucho, “So, when is our execution going to happen?”

“Who knows? Things never happened on time here even before the Matachìn showed up. The red sash traitors are very
disorganized. There is much to be done in preparation, and they are probably still busy drinking to get up their courage to watch us die. They have to set up security along the parade route.”

“What if they take us to the city in separate trucks?” Ryan said. “That will make escape much more difficult.”

“They won’t do that. Two trucks would be harder to protect. More work.”

Then Ryan caught the scrape of more bootsteps, again coming their way. “Are they coming back for the plates?” he asked Chucho.

“I don’t think so. Listen…”

Ryan heard a different kind of rhythmic chanting. This was joyless, monotonal grunting; it sounded like a funeral dirge. Then came the unmistakable metallic rattle of tambourines, the same musical instrument he’d seen in the hands of the priests.

“I think it’s time,” Chucho said. “They are coming for us. We have to pretend we’re drugged. Keep your head down and don’t make any fast movements. Keep to the shadows as much as you can. Do whatever they tell you, but do it slowly.”

With that, Ryan’s double picked up the remaining food and dumped most of it into the cell’s toilet, a rusting, galvanized bucket. He poured the wine into the bucket, too, then put the empty bowls and bottles back in plain sight.

Ryan stood gripping the cell’s bars, looking down the low-ceilinged hall. He could see the execution detail approaching. The priests were in the lead, all eight of them, swaying in unison as they chanted and shuffled along under the weak electric light. Some of them swung incense burners beside their ankles. Behind them was Fright Mask, and behind him
was a contingent of red sash guards. They came to a halt outside the cell.

The governor-general of Veracruz stepped forward, stopping at the other side of the bars. Despite Chucho’s warning to stay back, Ryan stood his ground; he did half close his eye and pretended to be using the bars to hold himself upright.

As he had earlier in the day, Generalissimo al Modo wore the white uniform, the high pile of dreads in their golden cage. He was also carrying a gold-scabbarded, pearl-handled saber with pommel tassel. The corridor’s stark lighting made the deformations of his face seem all the more exaggerated, and horrifying. Ryan assumed the oral surgery had done something untoward to his salivary glands—Fright Mask was drooling between his golden fangs. Long strands of clear slime swayed off his chin.

Up close the general’s eyes radiated something that struck Ryan as very strange. He didn’t get the sense that there was a person trapped and peeking out from behind that hideously sculpted, permanent grin. It was like some other kind of creature was looking out at him. Something alien, perhaps not of this earth. Something that had traveled to places where human beings were never supposed to go. And done things there that human beings were never supposed to do.

At Fright Mask’s signal, the priests advanced. Keeping well back from the bars, the men in the pointed hats and bleeding veils began their ritual, which consisted of mumbling punctuated by the occasional shout, a shuffling line dance, and the fanning of incense into the doomed men’s cell.

To Ryan it smelled like burning hair.

He stepped back from the pall of noxious smoke, moving
slowly as Chucho had suggested. He moved to the rear wall, beside his cell mate. In a whisper, out of the corner of his mouth, Ryan asked Chucho what was going on.

“They are preparing us for sacrifice to the Atapuls,” the look-alike hissed back. “This is the priests’ purifying ritual.”

“How about giving us a purifying bath?”

“It’s a spiritual cleansing,” Chucho said. “It doesn’t require soap and water. We don’t smell too bad compared to the Matachìn.”

“Yeah, they work hard at it.”

Amid the clouds of burning hair smoke, the spider priest, Itzamna, whipped out a clutch of pale tubular objects.

Ryan nudged Chucho.

“They’re bird quills,” his double informed him, “plucked from sea eagles’ wings.”

Ryan estimated they were ten inches long and a quarter inch in diameter.