When the tug came within four hundred yards of the pier, Ryan saw it was packed end to end; thousands of people had assembled and were waiting for them to arrive. Another hundred yards closer and he could see that the overloaded dock was just the tip of the crowd, which stretched unbroken, back into the brightly lit city streets. There was no telling how far back it went. The throng was like a single entity, a vast amoeba-thing in constant, chaotic motion, only kept from spilling out in all directions by the building walls on either side. Between celebratory blasts of the ships’ horns, Ryan heard yelling and blaring fragments of music. The din got even louder as the tug pulled alongside the pier. The music—caterwaul singing backed by frenzied fiddle, drums and guitar—boomed down from loudspeakers mounted on the lamp posts.
A sea of sweaty, brown faces greeted them.
The wildly excited citizens of Veracruz waved Day-Glo-colored plastic pennants emblazoned with unintelligible symbols. They held ten times larger-than-life-size papier-mâché heads on long poles, which they jigged up and down. Some of the paper sculptures had flat noses, ornate headdresses and leering mouths lined with cruel fangs. The colors were bizarre instead of lifelike—glistening green or pink skins, pointed black tongues, insane red and purple eyes with yellow pupils. Ryan strained to read the words written across their neckplates: Atapul the First; Atapul the Second; and so on, up to Atapul the Tenth.
They were names, he figured.
Ryan had no clue what the stylized images represented, whether they were gods or barons, but the meaning of some of the other sculpted faces was all too apparent. Bobbing in front of him on pikes were gigantic human heads with a ghastly bluish pallor, bleeding from nose, eyes and mouths. Cheeks and foreheads were speckled with red dots. Their expressions were fixed in rictus agony and terror.
Plague masks.
Plague like the one that had struck Padre Island.
Mildred squeezed his arm hard to get his attention, then raised her manacled hands to point toward the landward, lighthouse end of the pier.
There, not thirty yards away, on the end of a wooden pole, ten times life size, was Ryan’s own face, or a close approximation thereof. It was crudely rendered and painted, but all the pertinent details were there: the black eye patch, the scar that split his brow, the dark curly hair, the single surviving eye, the bearded cheeks, the square chin. The only difference was, the patch and scar had been reversed on the sculpture, as if he was staring into a mirror.
There were more of the giant, eye-patch faces spaced here and there among the seething throng.
“What the fuck?” Ryan said.
Chapter Two
Harmonica Tom stood at the helm of Tempest, feathering the engine’s throttle to maintain a constant safe distance from the row of ship lights in front of him. He ran the forty-foot vessel blacked-out, as he had done every night for the last three weeks, every night since he’d escaped from Padre Island. Finding the pirate convoy after dark was a piece of cake for the seasoned skipper. The six target boats were always lit up, mast, bow and stern; this to help keep them from crashing into one another.
During the day, Tom had to lay back in his pursuit for fear a crow’s-nest lookout would glimpse his mast tops astern. The last thing he wanted was for part of the fleet to peel off and double back to check out who was following its wake. The seagoing trader was sure they’d have no trouble recognizing Tempest: he’d already used it to kick their asses once. Unfortunately, he’d only managed to sink a single ship, while damaging two others. The fallback in pursuit meant he had to do some zigging and zagging to find the convoy again after sundown.
No problem this night, though.
The Matachìn ships were under engine power; even the slave galley tugs were burning diesel. And they were heading in toward the coast, making for the corona of shimmering lights low on the horizon.
By Tom’s map reckoning, it had to be Veracruz.
It was starting to look like the fire talkers’ stories were all true. That there really was a wider and more prosperous world than Deathlands, existing invisibly, simultaneously, from nukeday forward.
When he had first heard the tales of civilization’s survival in the south, Tom had wanted to get in on the ground floor, to be the first to establish peaceful commerce, to forge trade links with the more advanced culture, and thereby get his hands on some of its fabled material wealth. But after seeing what the dreadlocked emissaries of that culture had done to Padre Island, the entrepreneurship fantasies vanished. Payback had become his single-minded goal.
And payback was his forte.
Like other Deathlands traders, Harmonica Tom Wolf had committed his share of morally questionable deeds over the years—some might even call them “atrocities.” It was part of staying in business, and staying alive. He had systematically eliminated rivals trying to encroach on his territory. He had closed deals with hot lead and cold steel instead of smiles and handshakes. He had transported cargos of uncut jolt and high explosives without thinking twice. He had never purposefully messed with women and kids, though. And when he had sent another trader or coldheart on the last train west, it had always been a chill-or-be-chilled situation, and it was usually face-to-face, if not nose-to-nose.
The horror he had seen at Padre had transformed him, and not in a good way. Images of the dead and dying in that shantyville were branded into the root of his brain. Whenever he managed to grab a few winks of sleep, they invariably shook him awake. He came to gasping for air, spitting mad, fingers clawing for the butt of his stainless-steel .45 Smith wheelgun, looking around for someone to chill.
The Nuevo-Texicans’ passing hadn’t been quick or clean, not like getting shot or stabbed or fragged by shrap. They had disintegrated from the inside out, cooked in their skins by fever, laying helpless in pools of their own bodily waste. These were folks he’d done business with for years. Folks he respected. He even knew their kids by name. Kids who’d died the same awful way. He’d had three weeks to stew over what had happened to them, and why.
From the evidence on the scene it looked like disease had ravaged more than half the population before the pirates showed up. Tom had never seen or heard of anything like it. Of the islanders who were stricken by the plague, no one recovered. It was one hundred percent debilitating and one hundred percent fatal. And that wasn’t the whole story. The outbreak had peaked just in time for the naval assault and invasion.
An unlucky turn of fate?
Harmonica Tom didn’t think so.
The Nuevo-Texicans were anything but pushovers. Every man, woman and child older than the age of eight could handle a blaster, and they had plenty of ammo and heavy automatic weapons. Through cagey barter they had accumulated some explosives, too—they had a good stock of Claymore anti-pers mines. For thirty years the islanders had successfully defended their grounded freighter and its stores against all comers. The question was, could a small force of Matachìn have overwhelmed the hardened, battle-tested defenses and superior numbers without help from the plague?
Definitely not, Tom had concluded. The pirates lacked the manpower to take Padre Island hill by hill, and long-distance shelling alone couldn’t do the job.
Disease as a weapon of war, of conquest, of genocide wasn’t anything new in the history of the planet. Tom remembered reading about small pox–infected blankets somewhere in his shipboard collection of predark books. Long before Armageddon, they had been handed out to reservation Indians to make them sick and wipe them out. The how of what had happened at Padre was a mystery that might never be solved, but Harmonica Tom was damn well sure the appearance of the plague was no coincidence.
The objective of the invasion by sea hadn’t been simple, familiar robbery, either. The Matachìn had blown apart the beached freighter that contained all of the islanders’ worldly goods, and having done that, they just left it to burn, as if it held nothing worth stealing. The objective