The two other pirates closed on the companions with their machetes drawn. Ryan and J.B. met the downward slashes on the chains that connected their wrists, steel scraping on steel. Ryan ripped the machete away, sending it flying over his shoulder and out of the truck. Because of his rib injury, J.B. didn’t have the strength to tear his trapped blade away, but it didn’t matter. He kept it tied up long enough for Krysty and Jak to join the fray. They shoulder-rammed the pirates off their feet, and when the men landed on the truck bed the payback for twenty-one days of hell began in earnest. Concentrating on the unarmored heads, the companions did their damnedest with bootheels, shattering and scattering jawbones and teeth, sending blood and then skull and brains squirting in all directions.
As the companions regrouped around the Reed boy, the rest of the pirate phalanx scrambled onto the truck. Ryan and his comrades fought in a frenzy, but hobbled by the bodies of the other slaves they were chained to, overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers, it was a lost cause from the start. After a couple of minutes they began to fall, one by one, under the rain of blows. Ryan was the last to drop, struck in the head and neck simultaneously. As more blows pounded him to the deck, he felt the boy torn from his grasp.
In a second he was back on his feet, but the anchor of the other slaves he was chained to kept him from jumping out of the truck in pursuit.
Jak, J.B., Krysty, Mildred and Doc rose bloodied from the stake truck bed. They watched through the wall slats as the Matachìn carried young Garwood fighting and thrashing up the steps to the altar. They pinned him on his back in the middle of the ancient stone slab, his arms and legs spread wide. With one hand the spider priest tore open the boy’s ragged T-shirt, the other hand held the golden dagger.
“Lord have mercy,” Doc intoned.
But there was no mercy on offer this night.
The priest raised the ceremonial dagger in both hands, poised to strike downward, into the defenseless chest.
Garwood Reed didn’t beg for his life; he didn’t shame himself. A true son of Deathlands, he reared back his head and spit full in the priest’s face. That he could work up the necessary gob of spit under the circumstances spoke volumes as to his courage and his fortitude.
Without bothering to wipe away the spittle, the priest drove home the blade.
The boy went rigid on the altar.
A practiced, circular stroke opened a yawning hole beneath the sternum, and Garwood’s body suddenly relaxed. The boy was already dead when the priest plunged a hand into the cavity past the wrist, rooted around for a moment, and then jerked out a handful of dripping red flesh.
The heart.
The priest raised the gory hunk of muscle to his mouth. He sucked a mouthful of blood from one of its severed vessels then spit it out. He sucked and spit four times, in each of the ordinal directions. Crimson rivulets drooled off his chin.
It was a blessing of some unspeakable kind.
“Why him?” Krysty gasped. “Why did the bastards take him? ”
“Because he was the youngest of the captured slaves,” Mildred said, her eyes brimming with tears. “The young ones are probably the most prized as sacrifices to the demons they worship.”
“Or are forced to worship,” Ryan said.
Looking around, he saw the stigma of the foul religion at every turn. The color of the church. The sashes of the armed sec men. The robes of the murderer priest. The banners hanging down the fronts of the buildings. When you were outnumbered big-time, organized terror was the only way to control a subject people. Mebbe this place wasn’t so different than Deathlands, after all, he thought. The barons enforced their tyranny and extracted obedience with violence and fear. If there was a difference here, it was in scale and sophistication.
“There will be hell to pay for this abomination,” Doc swore, his pale blue eyes blazing with fury, his teeth stained red with his own blood. “By the Three Kennedys, there will surely be hell to pay….”
Drenched with sweat from the fighting, Ryan struggled to catch his breath in the seething, humid air. The red sashes all around the convoy were jumping up and down, waving their clubs, working themselves into a dither over the sacrifice. Their chill frenzy spilled into and infected the surrounding crowds. Pretty soon everyone was jumping up and down, and yelling blue murder.
A civilian suddenly darted through the line of red sashes and jumped into the back of the stake truck before anyone could stop him. His eyes looked bloodshot and squirrelly, like he was strung out on jolt. He had a long, thin-bladed knife clasped between his teeth, the sharp edge pointing away from his lips. Whipping the knife from his jaws, with an animal cry, he charged for Ryan.
The reveller intended to do a little sacrificing himself, maybe grab some of glory of the moment.
Ryan easily deflected the too-slow lunge with his manacled wrists and delivered a cracking head butt. Blood gushed from the man’s crushed nose, but it was already lights out, squirrelly eyes rolling back in his skull. Doc, Mildred and Jak seized hold of the attacker’s arms and legs and threw him out of the truck. The red sashes swarmed in and pulled the unconscious man away.
They were still beating him into the pavement when High Pile hopped back on the running board and the trucks resumed their slow-speed parade. They drove past a railroad terminal, obviously long-abandoned. From there the convoy followed the road’s curve onto the peninsula. Behind them, the mob followed, clogging the street curb to curb. It trailed them for what Ryan guessed was close to two miles. Then the trucks turned off the road and parked on a stone quay between a row of stone buildings and the edge of the bay.
Forty feet away, across the water, was the old Spanish fort. Bright lights aiming down from notches in the battlements illuminated a low, pedestrian bridge that connected the fort to the quay.
The captives were shoved out of the stake trucks and forced to line up beside them. At High Pile’s order, the Matachìn disconnected Ryan from the file, pulled him from the ranks and pushed him to the bridge.
It appeared he was the slave of honor.
The far end of the bridge terminated at the point of one of the ravelins. The diamond-shaped projection, three-stories of windowless, weathered limestone block, stuck out from the fort’s perimeter. Ryan could see a narrow archway at the bridge’s end, and an open wrought-iron gate.
Urged forward at blasterpoint onto the bridge, Ryan glanced over the side. In the lights from the battlements he saw bones. Human bones in the crystal-clear water. The bottom was carpeted with mounds of them. Stripped white, jumbled skulls, long bones, ribs. There were darker blotches, too, and they were moving sideways. Crabs the size of dinner plates crawled over the piles of naked bones, looking for a snippet that the others had missed.
Fat, happy crabs.
Chapter Four
To get a view out the screen in the deck hold’s narrow air vent, Daniel Desipio had to press his temple against the ceiling and crane his neck at a painful angle. The twentieth-century freezie and author of twenty-nine published novels could hear the wild victory celebration outside, but he couldn’t see any of it. The view out the bug-proofed air vent was entirely blocked by the bow of the tug moored closely behind.
Despondent, Daniel slumped back to the floor of his five-by-five-by-five cell and hung his head in his hands. There would have been no great victory in Deathlands without him, yet no one knew or cared about his contribution to the campaign. His thoughts slipped into a deep, dark and familiar groove.
More than a century earlier, before Armageddon, while still a ghost