Dark Resurrection (19 page)

If the city had been taken back by the jungle, the worldfamous canal was nowhere to be seen.

As the black sloop neared the entrance to the bay, High Pile ordered his crew to drop sail and he started up the ship’s engines. It appeared the route to landfall was too tricky for wind power. Though broad, the bay had filled in on either side with dense stands of mangrove scrub, leaving a deep but narrow central channel. Cloudy, turquoise water lapped against a dark, impenetrable tangle of tree roots. The thin, overcast skies and the reflections off the jungle gave the air an oppressive, yellowish tinge.

A sickly place, Mildred reckoned, cooking at a slow simmer in the ninety-plus heat of midday. The atmosphere was sulfurous, thick with the smell of biological decay. Of swamp muck. Ahead, between the bow of the black ship and the overgrown ruin of a city, the beach was not sand, it was a flat of beige-colored, pestilential mud.

The city’s buildings, covered with greenery, reminded her of the Mayan temples in Guatemala she had vacation-toured before skydark. Enormous complexes, buried under mounds
of earth and vegetation; every distant hilltop the tip of yet another lost temple. How many people had lived in Colón, the gateway to the Pacific, before the end of the world? She guessed a couple of hundred thousand.

Something truly catastrophic had happened here.

Something different than the tidal wave damage Veracruz had suffered.

In Veracruz, the surviving population had been large enough to keep the jungle beaten back, to maintain a semblance of the predark status quo. Whatever had happened in Colón, its impact had been much more devastating to infrastructure and to the human population. Mildred had to figure the canal was a likely target for a Soviet MIRV on hellday, but this disaster hadn’t been the
direct
result of a nuke strike. If it had, there would have been the remains of a crater, a dead zone filled in with seawater. No buildings would have been left standing. Perhaps the all-out exchange of 2001 was over and done with before the Soviet ICBM aimed at the canal left its launch pad.

As she looked for the canal entrance, the first of the series of locks that raised and lowered ship traffic, and saw nothing but mangrove swamp, it dawned on her. The canal was gone. The locks were gone. Maybe the dams that held back the fresh water used to lift the ships over the isthmus were gone, too.

Somewhere in the back of her mind she recalled a number: fifty-two million. That was how many gallons of fresh water it had taken to move a ship from one end of the canal to the other. To supply the enormous quantity of water, great rivers had been dammed, vast man-made lakes had been created.

Mildred shivered, despite the heat, as she imagined the towering wall of water, water brown with a century’s worth of backed-up silt, rushing down the canal’s channel, scouring away everything in its path. A tightly focused laser beam of a disaster.

Just because this end of the canal hadn’t suffered a direct hit by a nuke, it didn’t mean the destruction wasn’t nuke-spawned. Chances were, the all-out exchange and the breaking of the dams were connected; chances were, they happened on the same day, at roughly the same time. The backbone of Central America was volcanic, Mildred knew, and it had a long history of violent earthquakes. The Soviet earth-shaker warheads launched against North America were designed to induce far-reaching geologic cataclysm.

Central America was a hair-trigger waiting for just the right tight-and-curly.

She looked around and saw no beached container ships rusting among the mangroves, and farther off the stern there was no breakwater to protect and mark the bay’s entrance. A lineup of cargo ships would have been anchored in the bay, off the canal entrance on the fateful day, waiting for their turn to cross the isthmus. As big as the tankers and freighters were, they would have been no match for the wave that came crashing down on them. To drain the hundreds of trillions of gallons of backed-up water would have taken a very long time. The torrent would have continued unabated for many hours, driving the wrecked ships far offshore to sink, disassembling the breakwater, boulder by boulder.

The poor people of Colón had had no chance. There was nowhere to run, but up. A few of the lucky ones might have
made it to safety in the top floors of the tallest buildings. The rest, caught unaware at street level, unable to understand what was happening, unable to react in time, would have been washed out to sea with everything else that wasn’t nailed down—and most of what was.

Ahead, the narrow ship channel was marked at intervals with tied-together clusters of floating, oil-stained, white plastic jugs fixed to the bottom with nylon rope. Closer to shore, two sailing ships were moored on the edge of the channel, anchored fore and aft to keep from drifting onto the flats. Their crews were nowhere to be seen. Farther on, in much shallower water, a half dozen small, open, fishing boats were tied to another claptrap buoy. There were no power vessels of any size, which made Mildred wonder if the Matachìn kept all their engine-powered ships farther north, closer to the primary sources of fuel. That made sense if fuel supplies were limited, and transport was difficult.

Beyond the fishing boats, she could see the uneven stumps of immense, concrete pier pilings, the pier decks having been ripped away.

Framing the nasty bay on three sides were low, heavily jungled hills. Had all this vegetation, had this complex ecosystem really survived a “nuclear winter”? she asked herself. A global deep-freeze that had supposedly lasted ten years?

Mildred had always had serious doubts on that subject—after all, who supposedly had been keeping track of the time and temperature, postnukeday? Was it some anonymous ass-scratcher living in a cave? Where were the readings taken? How? Over what span of years? As a scientist, Mildred knew precise definitions as well as precise measurements were vital to understanding natural phenomena. What was the ass-
scratcher’s definition of “nuclear winter”? Did he-she even have one? Or was this just one more in a long line of Deathlands myths, contrived by idiots for idiots to pass the time while they cracked and ate each other’s nits?

If the presumed “nuclear winter” had been a globe-encompassing event, it couldn’t have begun and completely dissipated as quickly as a generation. That kind of rapid freezing and warming on a planetary scale simply wasn’t possible, short of a change in earth’s orbit. If a “nuclear winter” scenario had happened after Armageddon, it was most likely localized to the Northern Hemisphere, where the missile strikes and counterstrikes had landed, where the atmospheric dust clouds would have been the thickest; and if there had been increased glaciation, it hadn’t been of any consequence.

And that didn’t address the point that ten years of unusually cold, localized weather didn’t even qualify as a mini–ice age, let alone “nuclear winter.”

A short distance from the shoreline, half in, half out of the water, was the twisted base of an enormous, latticework steel tower. It jutted like the bloody skeleton of some prehistoric reptile. The other end of the ruined tower was submerged, buried under the pale mud. In between, Mildred could see the rusting framework, some two hundred feet of it, just under the murky surface.

The waterfront of Colón had been rebuilt after the disaster, albeit on a much less ambitious scale. The modern city had become a shantyville on stilts over the stinking tidal mud flats, a maze of whitewashed, single-story buildings connected to one another and to the solid ground inland by elevated wooden walkways on flimsy-looking, pecker-pole
pilings. Beyond the peaks of the sheet metal roofs, on the other side of a narrow road cut, was a twenty-foot-high, solid wall of green leaves and branches.

At High Pile’s bellowed command, the pirate crew hopped to it, anchoring the black sloop securely fore and aft, within one hundred of the nearest shanty-on-stilts.

There were no fortifications in evidence. No gun emplacements, either. It seemed strange to Mildred that the Matachìn port sat undefended. Maybe it wasn’t a stronghold, after all. Or were all the potential threats so far away that defense wasn’t an issue?

Krysty shuffled up alongside Mildred, her red hair hanging lank around her shoulders. They didn’t look at each other; they certainly didn’t speak. They had decided not to talk in front of their captors. They didn’t want give away the fact that they were lucid. And perhaps get themselves forcibly injected with drugs. The whitecoats could have done that anyway, used hypodermics to dose them, but they seemed to want everything to be nice and friendly, all happy-face smiles, even when they were doing someone an injury.

The pirates lowered three large rowboats over the side. The companions were forced into one of them, then joined by a trio of Matachìn guards. High Pile, the whitecoats and more pirates got into the other boats, leaving the black ship with a skeleton crew.

At least the companions weren’t doing the rowing this time.

While they sat packed shoulder to shoulder on the stern thwarts, the pirates facing them amidships hauled back on the oars. The pirate lounging in the bow held a submachine gun balanced on his lap.

The sun flashed on the golden trinkets wound around their boot tops. When Mildred glanced down she saw a name
etched on a dangling locket: Lupe. A delicate, heart pendant on a thin gold chain. There were other names, too, and different styles of bracelet and necklace. Trophies of pillage, of rape and murder, worn like badges of honor, like combat medals.

One of the rower-Matachìn caught her looking at his trinket collection. A lewd gleam in his eye, he puckered up and blew her an obscene kiss.

Animals, she thought.

Stinking animals.

Mildred wondered what had kept them in check on the journey south. After all, they had had access to the cabin she and Krysty shared. Drugged women in chains. That sounded made-to-order for these creeps. Their lust, she reasoned, had to have been controlled by fear. If not fear of the wrath of their commander, then fear of the wrath of the Lords of Death. Which, upon reflection, didn’t bode all that well for any of the captives. It probably meant some greater purpose—or far nastier end—awaited them.

The Matachìn beached the bows of the boats on the mud flats. Then Mildred and the others were hoisted out by the armpits by pirates on either side. The seas were warm as bathwater. And this was as close to a bath as the Matachìn got. There was no way the captives could have navigated the oozing muck with their ankles in chains. The pirates sank in up to their knees as they struggled to lug them to the lip of a slimy concrete ramp that led up to the walkway.

At High Pile’s signal, two of the Matachìn waded back out to the boats, pushed one off the mud, jumped in and started rowing for the ship.

A welcoming committee awaited the others on the platform
above the ramp. If the five men were Matachìn, they had gone paramilitary. They wore jungle camouflage T-shirts and BDU pants. On shoulder slings they carried the same stubby little 9 mm submachine guns as the pirates. As the prisoners slowly ascended the ramp, little brown-faced kids peeked out at them through the glassless windows and doorless doorways of the shanties, then ducked back.

High Pile and Dr. Montejo approached one of the camouflage greeters, the one with the most radically sculpted face. He was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat. To Mildred’s surprise, the commander and the whitecoat didn’t salute, or offer to shake hands or simply nod, they immediately prostrated themselves on the walkway, raising their butts in the air, pressing their noses into the rough boards.

Subservience in spades.

The man they genuflected to grunted something and the two rose.

When High Pile spoke to his superior, Mildred thought she caught a proper name, or maybe it was a title or rank: Nibor. Something like that. High Pile repeated it every six or seven words.

The sun, filtered through the mesh of the straw, cast a tiny checkerboard of light and dark across Nibor’s face. His head and eyebrows were shaved. The tops of his ears had been shaved, as well, cut into points, and the lobes excised entirely. Narrow seams of scar tissue marked his brown cheeks, running from under the centers of his lower eyelids to his jawline, dividing his face into three unequal sections. Golden artificial fangs on his lower jaw curled out in front of his upper lip, the philtrum of which had been split like a dog’s, the fleshy drapes pulled back, so the sharpened points of his
natural teeth could show. He wore a necklace of ivory-colored, human finger bones, separated from each other by strung, gold-filled human teeth.

Mildred knew extensive plastic surgery when she saw it. She had seen it on the governor-general of Veracruz, as well. Whoever had wielded the #15 scalpel was a highly skilled surgeon, with the artistic vision of a raving psychopath.

Was Nibor a priest or a warrior? Mildred wondered. Or perhaps he was a combination of both.? The uniform he and the others in the welcoming committee sported was suitable for action, not empty, mumbo-jumbo ceremony. The others all had shaved heads, but less extreme facial alterations. It occurred to her that the scarifications, like the height of the piled dreadlocks, might be symbols of rank—only permanent, until death. Was the quintet a military wing of the Lords of Death priesthood, or perhaps some specially tasked, elite guard unit?

A conversation ensued between High Pile, Montejo and Nibor. As it progressed, Mildred managed to get the general drift. The Matachìn commander first bragged to his superior about what his men had done in Tierra de la Muerte, how they had laid waste to Padre Island, and brought back these five most suitable subjects, which he was turning over to Nibor with the greatest respect. High Pile announced that he and his crew would remain in Colón to await the return of the prisoners. Whereupon he and they would ship back to their real job: pillaging and chilling.