LITMIR.BIZ

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      The yawing of the tug caused the horizon to leap and fall wildly, making its two sister ships abruptly vanish and reappear astern. Despite the rain, despite the violent motion, J.B. was grateful for the opportunity to move around. Sitting for hours, pulling at the oars, knotted his back and thigh muscles. The constant ache in his cracked but healing ribs had diminished. The pain still peaked every time he took too deep a breath.

      They had been rowing the pirates’ massive, oceangoing tugboat for three weeks, give or take; three weeks since the fall of Padre Island and the Nuevo-Texican defeat. After the first week, it had become impossible to separate one day from the next—such was the monotony of crushing, mindless toil.

      Rounding the stern, J.B. faced into the wind and the wet. Sideways-blown raindrops spattered the lenses of his spectacles, partially obscuring his vision. He brushed away the drops with rag-bandaged, manacled hands. Dead ahead was a towering gray cloud that drifted alone like a monumental ship of the air. Its crest loomed high above them, hundreds of feet up into the grim sky, from its bottom edge hung a darker gray, ever-shifting veil. Where veil met sea, the water was pitch-black and boiling from concentrated, torrential rain.

      Steadily, inexorably, they were pulling for the very heart of the squall.

      A gruff voice crackled through the tug’s loud-hailer.

      The command was unintelligible gibberish to J.B., but the poncho-clad, Matachìn deck-watch immediately opened a hatch in the stern and started passing out five-gallon plastic buckets to the captives.

      Empty bucket at his feet, J.B. once again glanced over at Krysty and Jak. His longtime companions were shadows of their former selves. Krysty’s prehensile hair hung down around her shoulders in drenched, lifeless ribbons; her hip bones protruded alarmingly. Jak’s dead-white but youthful face had aged: it had become drawn and gaunt. His weather-cracked lips were flecked with dried blood; his ruby-colored eyes had sunk in their sockets, and they burned with a fevered intensity. Standing beside them was the blond Padre Islander boy, Garwood Reed, the same brave, defiant Deathlands fourteen-year-old who’d tried to lead the companions to safety during the assault on the grounded freighter. The pirates had transformed the youngest of their surviving captives into a stick figure with eyes rimmed by dark circles.

      J.B. was in as bad a physical state as they were. He had lost a lot of weight, too. Half his teeth were loose, his gums bled, his hands were blistered and split. His mind wasn’t right, either. He was having more and more difficulty concentrating, his thoughts continually plunging into a pit of self-directed anger. Even though they had been betrayed in the final moment by that shitweasel Daniel Desipio, a fire talker, he still blamed himself for the capture of his comrades, and for this gruesome outcome.

      Even though the galley slaves were fed morning and night, they were wasting away; it was inevitable, a matter of calories burned versus calories taken in. Their morning meal was a ladleful of gummy, weevily corn porridge mixed with molasses. The evening meal was the same gruel sprinkled with flaked salt-dried fish—bones, guts and all. Their food was boiled to mush in a caldron on the stern deck.

      Chained to their oars, J.B. and the others ate hog slop while their pirate captors feasted inside the ship’s main cabin. Fragrant spice and meat smells drifted out from the galley. Chilis. Cumin. Garlic. Beans. Rice. Slow-roasted pork. Deep-fried, freshly caught fish. The aromas made J.B.’s stomach rumble and his mouth water. Food had some kind of special significance for the stinking bastards.

      Holy moley significance.

      Their off-key singing and rhythmic chanting at meals never failed to set his nerves on edge. The pirates’ religion was as incomprehensible and hateful to J.B. as their gobbledygook language.

      Even though the Matachìn deck-watch was outnumbered ten to one, they turned their backs on the captives as they handed out the plastic buckets. It wasn’t negligence. It was confidence born of experience and training. The pirates knew the limits of their slaves, both physical and psychological. The captives were always chained to the rowing benches or linked together at the ankles; their wrists were cuffed. Overpowering the guards would require all thirty moving as one, an impossible feat, and not just because of the restraints. Fear of the consequences of failure—either lashings of the whip or agonizing death by machete chops—ensured that most of the prisoners would remain immobile during an attack; their deadweight doomed any mutiny attempt from the start.

      As far as J.B. was concerned, the Matachìn weren’t just foreign fighters, they were aliens from another world.

      After three weeks without a bath, J.B. knew he didn’t smell so great himself, but the rank, eye-watering pong of his overseers forced him to breathe through his mouth whenever they stood upwind. Pillaged feminine jewelry—delicate golden bracelets and necklaces—glittered around their boot tops and peeked out from behind the masses of waist-length, moldy dreadlocks. Some of them wore the torn, blood-stained dresses of their victims over the outside of their clothes. Gut-hook machetes, the standard-issue cutting weapon, hung in canvas scabbards on their hips.

      The pirates carried stubby submachine guns, of a design the Armorer had never seen. The blasters had an M-16 type plastic carrying handle/rear sight and a smooth, fixed rear plastic stock. A ventilated plastic front stock/shroud concealed an eight-inch barrel. The bore looked to be 9 mm. The 30-round curved mag was also made of the same high-strength plastic.

      During the one-sided battle for Padre Island, the Matachìn had worn mass-produced body armor, something unheard-of in the hellscape. The trauma plate had stopped Krysty’s .38 rounds cold. J.B. had seen that with his own eyes.

      The seven-ship raiding party had voyaged a great distance and without breaking a sweat had obliterated at least two heavily fortified outposts on the Gulf coast, Padre Island and Matamoros ville. They had taken the few survivors—including J.B. and the others—as replacement galley slaves. Inexplicably, the Matachìn hadn’t bothered to loot Padre’s beached container ship, which was full of what J.B. and his companions deemed irreplaceable predark spoils; they’d just let it burn.

      Up until a month ago, up until a week before his enslavement, J.B. had given little consideration to the wider world outside Deathlands. There had been no reason for him to consider it. The daily battle for food, shelter and safety was a grindstone difficult to see over. And on top of that, making do in the hellscape was something J.B. excelled at and took justifiable pride in.

      Though nuclear Armageddon was more than a century in the past, Deathlands had not yet recovered in any meaningful way. There was still no manufacturing to speak of, large or small. Its norm population remained primitively agrarian: hand-cultivated crops were supplemented by seasonal hunting and gathering. Vast areas were made uninhabitable by lingering high levels of radiation from overlapping Soviet MIRV strikes. Travel over any distance was risky because of roaming bands of savage chiller-muties. A ruined road system and a lack of surplus goods limited the possibilities for expansion of trade.

      The existing social organization lay in the hands of the barons, self-proclaimed royalty who controlled their fiefdoms with small, relatively well-equipped armies of sec men. The barons’ territories were bounded by easily defensible topographic features: mountains, plateaus, river channels and the like. Because mass communication was nonexistent and individual human settlements so scattered, there was no way to accurately estimate Deathlands survivors, but it was certainly a tiny fraction of the 200 million before skydark. The overall numbers were so reduced and the land area so enormous that wider conquest—or national reunification—by any one of the barons, or an association of same, was simply out of the question.

      For more than a hundred years the barons’ winning strategy had been to hunker down and hold ground.

      J.B. wasn’t incurious or closed-minded about the outside world—like most other born-and-bred Deathlanders he was simply dismissive of it. If the United States of America, the most powerful country to ever exist on the face of the earth, couldn’t rebuild itself after the nukecaust, then how could the considerably less well-off nations to the south?

      A month earlier, while still free, he and his companions had been forced to consider an alternate view.

      Beyond

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