the whirling sensation passed, Okie once again peered through the binocs, scanning the lines of people filtering between stacked cargo containers for his two hugely pregnant wives. He didn’t see either of them, or any of his six kids. Everybody who could fire a blaster was carrying one. Women and the older children wore AKs and sawedoff pump shotguns slung across their backs. There were no tear-streaked faces, no quivering lower lips. The islanders, to a person, were jut-jaw defiant.
They had all heard other Fire Talkers’ stories about the Matachìn, selected, fragmented details that were, of course, calculated to entertain and raise the short hairs. There was no way of telling if any of them were true, or how much the facts had been exaggerated.
It was rumored that the pirates all carried machetes with razor-sharp cane hooks at their tips—gut rippers. It was said they used the heavy blades to chop off any hands raised against them. After cauterizing the fresh stumps with torches so their captives wouldn’t bleed to death, they nailed the severed appendages in pairs to the ramparts of conquered villes, palm outward in a gesture and symbol of permanent submission.
It was rumored that they made the subjected people kneel whenever they passed, kneel with noses and foreheads pressed firmly into the dirt. It was said they wore glittering garlands of looted gold jewelry entwined in their matted dreadlocks and around their scarred boot tops. Apparently, they never washed themselves, either.
Never.
Stink was their religion. Pong was their manifesto.
According to the stories, some of the Matachìn wore bright, floral frocks over their blood-stained trousers and boots, shoulder-seam–split trophies ripped from the women they had ravaged and murdered.
According to the Fire Talkers, the Matachìn indulged in bloody and brutal ritual spectacles; they had established an extensive slave trade along the Atlantic coast of Mexico and Central America; they worked their captives to death in their agricultural fields and gaudies; and to amuse themselves during long sea voyages the pirate crews choreographed and staged slave fights to the death.
The common denominator in all the Fire Talker variations was death, unpleasant and prolonged.
Down in the ville, islanders were still gathering up everything of value, including excess stockpiles of food and fresh water. The water they couldn’t move, they dumped onto the sand. The idea was to leave the pirates nothing to eat or drink. The Nuevo-Texicans were well prepared for a long siege. They had the entire storehouse of the Yoko Maru at their disposal. The pirates had only whatever they brought along with them. Assuming the islanders could hold the ship for the duration, sooner or later problems of resupply would drive the Matachìn back to whatever hell-hole had spawned them.
The possibility did exist that the pirates had taken their fill of spoils in Browns ville, that they weren’t coming north, after all. But that wasn’t something the islanders could count on. Even as the residents crisscrossed between the ville and the Yoko Maru, explosive charges were being laid in the narrow, winding paths between the shanties. The predark Claymore mines with their payloads of steel ball bearings wouldn’t be trip-wired and armed until the enemy came into view and the last of the women and children were safely onboard the ship.
Okie raised the binocs, taking in the bow of the vessel. Surrounded by a rapt, deck-seated audience, the Fire Talker was perched on a bitt, waving his arms and talking animatedly.
Giving the droolies more to slobber about, no doubt.
The islanders’ usual practice was to securely tether the triple stupes, staking them at least three yards apart to keep them from playing hide the slime eel. When droolies mated with droolies of the opposite sex, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: more droolies. In camps elsewhere in the Deathlands, these unfortunates were not so tenderly cared for. The moment the symptoms surfaced—the slack lower jaw and vacant stare—heads were smashed in. The Nuevo-Texicans kept their little flock alive, not out of compassion or a sense of parental duty, but because the droolies were so damned amusing, even if the camp dogs failed to get the joke. Having someone around visibly more messed up than you were had another benefit, as well. It made a person feel instantly better about him or herself. “At least I’m not a droolie,” was the unspoken but ever present refrain.
Okie was struck by a sudden chill that started at the base of his spine and rippled up his back and neck, and crab-crawled over the top of his scalp. Which he found very strange, given the air temperature even with the wind was in the high eighties. As the shudder passed through him, the steel rod behind his eye probed deeper into the nerve bundle. He saw bright, dancing spots of light and once again felt the urge to spew. Worse, there was a simultaneous, uncomfortable pressure building deep down in his bowels. Had to be something he ate, he thought. Underdone rat on a stick, mebbe. Closing his eyes and gripping the rail in both hands, Okie tried to will the sensations away. He still had another couple of hours before he was relieved of the watch.
“TIME DILDO-LATOR! TIME DILDO-LATOR!” The seated droolies rocked their hips, scooting their behinds on the deck in time to the gleeful chant. “Time dildo-lator! Time dildo-lator!”
Daniel Desipio sat back and basked in their adoration. They couldn’t get enough of his backstories and technical explanations, although it was unclear if they understood a single word of the complex scientific and philosophical concepts that underlaid his narratives.
Still, the frenzied attention buoyed his spirits.
From the Yoko Maru’s bitt, Daniel surveyed the squalid little ville spread out below. Construction had started in the most weather-protected spot, in the lee of the freighter’s bow. The first cluster of single-story huts used the ship’s hull for their rear walls. Building materials had to be salvaged and ferried from the flooded ruins of Corpus, so subsequent structures shared both side and rear walls. Nothing in the ville was straight, not roofs, not doorways, not lanes, not side yards. Everything was made of accumulated scrap, unpainted or covered in peeling layers of paint. Over three decades the slapdash habitations had spread to the shore of the anchorage on the north side. The islanders had built monuments to themselves, expressing their personalities, desires, artistic senses with found materials, the restricted pallette of the rubbish heap. It could have been a village on the edge of a garbage dump in predark India or Brazil. Or a squatter camp in South Africa.
That said, the grounded container ship’s bounty had provided every ramshackle hut with its own Taiwanese knock-off Weber kettle and fancy barbecue tools, and its own plastic lawn furniture.
The Nuevo-Texicans were damn proud of their little corner of the world.
Daniel Desipio, twentieth-century freezie, had a different perspective: a shithole by any other name.
For what had to have been the thirtieth repetition in as many hours, the Fire Talker recited the story of how the Vikings acquired the time dilator, the desperate bargain they had made with the Martian hordes, and their combined exploitation of the ancient Norse Runestone Concatenation. That terrestrial-extraterrestrial plot had been frustrated by the intervention of the Iroquois Ninja princess—proud, statuesque, with raven hair and slanted black eyes, and spots of blushing rose in the centers of her buckskin-colored cheeks—and of her singing katana, and her coterie of cloud operatives that moved from one human mind to another like stops on a subway line.
As he mechanically regurgitated the pulp fiction series’ canon—something he could have done in his sleep—Daniel watched his audience for the initial, subtle signs of infection. A growing restlessness. A flushing of the face. A sensitivity to light. He visualized the viruses invading individual host cells, commandeering reproductive machinery, replicating until their sheer volume burst cell walls, then spewing forth
