LITMIR.BIZ

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the outside of his door hard, then hooking a thumb toward the pickup bed for Tom to climb aboard.

      The rusted-through bed was littered with salvaged lengths of iron pipe and other metal scrap. Before they moved on, the guy in the middle of the bench seat reached back through the cab’s missing rear window and handed the new passenger a bottle one-quarter full of a pale yellow liquid.

      After sniffing at the contents, Tom didn’t hesitate. He took a long, gulping pull. The oily, powerful spirits burned like hellfire all the way down to his belly. Not to be outdone by this show of gracious hospitality, he immediately passed out the dead man’s cigars. As he did so he said, “Ehh? Ehh?”

      His new friends accepted the smokes with delight and everybody lit up.

      Language problem solved.

      After a bit of gear-grinding protest, the pickup roared off down the road, squeaking and rattling like it was going to fly apart on the next pothole. Harmonica Tom sat with his back against a wheelwell, blowing sweet, pungent smoke at the night sky.

      For the moment at least, the belly of the beast didn’t seem half bad.

       Chapter Three

      “It turns out you’re famous here, too, lover,” Krysty said to Ryan’s back. “They’ve got your head on a stick.”

      “It’s not me,” the one-eyed warrior countered. “It’s ass backward.”

      As the lead tug slipped in alongside the pier, with the other two tugs following close behind, raucous, rhythmic music blasted from speakers bolted to the light stanchions. When the crews hurried to tie off the mooring lines and extend the short gangways, the waiting crowd really came unglued; Ryan could hardly hear himself think for all the noise.

      Up close, the size and frenzy of the mob gave even him pause. For the first time in three weeks of captivity, Ryan caught himself thinking that maybe they weren’t going to make it out of this alive, after all. It was a thought he couldn’t come to grips with, and instinctively smothered.

      Then the pirates started laying on the lash to make the terrified slaves rise from their benches.

      Whipped hard across the shoulders from behind, J.B. lurched to his feet, his face twisted in outrage. For a second, Ryan’s old battlemate lost all semblance of control. He jerked at his chains like an animal, trying desperately, futilely, to break free, to get his hands on his grinning, dreadlocked tormentor.

      At least J.B. wasn’t pissing himself, which is more than Ryan could say for some of the other slaves around them. The Padre Islander kid, Garwood Reed, looked stunned, frozen like a jacklit rabbit. The companions had done their best to protect him during the torturous journey—though young the orphaned boy had proved himself in battle—but apart from their each giving up a bit of the scant rations to keep him going there was little to be done. “Stay close to me, son,” Ryan told the teen. “No matter what happens, stay close….”

      Ryan felt it was his responsibility to get the companions clear of this mess, somehow, some way, but as things stood that feat was impossible. Looking at the mob, he knew he couldn’t keep his friends from being torn limb from limb, if that’s the croaking that fate held in store.

      For their part, never had J.B., Krysty and Jak been confronted by so many agitated people at one time. In Deathlands a big crowd might be a couple of hundred souls. Krysty’s prehensile hair had drawn up into tight ringlets of alarm. The expression in Jak’s bloodred eyes was unreadable; the albino had retreated somewhere deep inside his own head. Mildred and Doc, both born in earlier eras, before Armageddon’s large-scale population cull, had experience with masses of humanity. And Ryan who had been kidnapped to Shadow World, a parallel earth where the profusion of people had overrun all other forms of life, was no virgin when it came to mob scenes. However, none of them had ever been the focus of such furious and overwhelming attention.

      Flogged until they all got to their feet, the rowers were linked ankle to ankle and then driven toward the waiting gangplanks.

      As Ryan and the companions edged forward to the tug’s gate, he saw men in red sashes and straw hats pounding back the crowd with cudgels and the metal-shod butts of sawed-off, double-barreled shotguns. The sec men swinging clubs carried fold-stock, 9 mm submachine guns on slings over their shoulders. With brute force, they opened a lane in the packed bodies to three stake trucks that were idling on the pier. The sec men held the path open with difficulty. As spectators surged forward, they had to be beaten back.

      When Ryan stepped into view on the gangplank, the mob on either side went crazy, pointing at him, jumping up and down. They started up a chant.

       “¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”

       “¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”

       “¡Shi-ball-an-kay!”

      Krysty leaned forward and hollered in his ear, “Didn’t I say you were famous!”

      “What are they saying? What’s it mean?” Ryan shouted at Mildred.

      “Damned if I know!” she shouted back. “It’s not Spanish!”

      A superamplified voice, syrupy-smooth and talking a mile a minute, bellowed through a megaphone mounted atop the roof of the lead truck’s cab. The rapid-fire speech was backed by recorded accordion, drums and trumpets gone wild—which competed with the other music pouring out of the pier’s speakers.

      At blasterpoint, Ryan, his battlemates and young Reed were forced to climb into the back of the first stake truck. Like the other two vehicles, it was aimed toward the city center. When the bed was crammed full of slaves, thirty or so in all, a sec man slammed shut the wooden rear gate. The remaining trucks were likewise loaded and locked.

      Red-sashed sec men surrounded the vehicles, laboring to keep the crowd from surging forward and overrunning the prisoners. The companions had automatically moved back to back, in a tight defensive ring. Garwood Reed did as he’d been told: he stuck to Ryan’s side like glue.

      All three trucks gunned their engines and started honking for the mob to make way. Nobody budged. And there were too many people on the pier for the vehicles to force the issue.

      Then the Matachìn started trooping off the tugs and onto the dock. They advanced in a tight, military formation with their commander, the guy with the tallest piled dreads and the most pillaged jewelry, marching in the lead.

      When the assembled people of Veracruz saw the pirates in full battle gear and weapons bearing down on them, they made tracks backward. And they did something else that surprised the hell out of Ryan. Those closest to the Matachìn immediately dropped to their knees and pressed their noses and foreheads to the concrete. There wasn’t room on the dock for all of the people to prostrate themselves. Those who couldn’t bow down retreated as far from the pirates as they could, opening a narrow path for the trucks down the middle of the pier.

      The pecking order of the men with blasters was established immediately, Ryan noted. The red sashes standing next to the truck whipped off their hats, knelt, and lowered their heads before High Pile, the Matachìn commander. One of them, probably the most senior-ranking, kneaded the brim of his cowboy hat as he spoke and then pointed up at Ryan. His words were lost in the din, but a smile spread over the captain’s greasy face.

      High Pile jumped onto the lead truck’s running board, reached through the open passenger window and snatched the microphone from a suddenly struck-mute public address announcer.

       “¡La guerra está terminada!” His voice boomed over the recorded music tape loop, boomed over the crowd. “¡Victoria eterna para los reyes de la muerte! ¡Los gemelos heroicos son cautivos!”

      The commander repeated the same words over and over, and with every repetition the mob sent up a louder cheer.

      “Now, that ’s in Spanish!” Mildred exclaimed.

      The companions huddled closer to hear what else she had to say.

      “He’s telling

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