poultry, cigars and rack after rack of new clothing.
The other side of the avenue was lined with people and hawkers’ carts, too, but there were no buildings, just a row of tall, skinny trees that marked the border of a broad, central park. The park’s pavement was made up of checkerboard marble tiles in white, gray and black. On the other side of the square, high above the tops of the trees, stood the floodlit bell tower of a predark cathedral. It dominated the square, glowing in the lights like an ember, fiery red against the night sky.
As the trucks crept forward, Ryan picked up distinctive odors by turns—camellias, spices, incense, fresh-baked bread, charcoal smoke and grilled meats. This was nothing like Shadow World. That place had been stripped bare by insatiable human appetites, like the ruins of a cornfield after a swarm of locusts. Veracruz was the exact opposite of the parallel earth: it was ripe, fecund, teeming with energy.
“Oh, my God!” Mildred exclaimed, pointing toward the ground floor of one of the buildings with both manacled hands.
“What?” Ryan said.
“It’s a Burger King!” was her cryptic reply.
Further explanation was interrupted by a barrage of garbage. As the trucks came directly under the balconies, the folks up there stopped throwing confetti and started throwing rotten fruit, to the applause of the surrounding mob. The slaves ducked and covered as overripe mango and papaya splattered the bed of the trucks and their defenseless backs.
The volley let up only after the convoy had crawled out of range.
When their truck rounded a corner, Ryan could see it wasn’t the tint of the spotlights that made the cathedral look red; it was painted top to bottom the color of dried blood.
Or maybe it was blood.
The mob packing the cathedral steps broke apart before the wedge of Matachìn. The three-truck convoy stopped. High Pile hopped down from the running board and climbed up to the stone altar that blocked the cathedral’s main entrance. Pungent clouds of incense poured from brass censers on either side of the arched doorway.
An old man with a sagging, deeply seamed face waited for him behind the dished out altar. His headdress was made of scrolled posts and cross-members of gold-painted wood. His brocaded, crimson robe didn’t hide skinny arms and legs, and a round, protruding belly—he looked like a hairless brown spider playing dress-up.
Ryan noticed that while everybody else retreated with their noses pressed to ground, the spider remained upright, as if he and the commander were equal in rank.
Pirate and high priest conferred head-to-head for a moment in the cathedral’s entryway, then with a flourish, the priest unsheathed a long, golden dagger that he held over his head and turned for all to see. The captain shouted an order down to his men. Five Matachìn immediately and gleefully swarmed over the sides of the lead stake truck, jumping down into the midst of the chained slaves.
The pirates booted aside the prisoners, moving with purpose in the same direction, toward Ryan and the others.
“Together now,” the one-eyed warrior growled as the Matachìn bore down on them in a blitz attack.
Things happened very quickly in the narrow space between the fence walls of the stake truck—close quarters that temporarily negated the pirates’ advantage in mobility and firepower.
The companions’ three weeks of fury, suffering and frustration exploded in violence.
J.B. jumped forward, howling, to meet and block the rush of the first of the on-coming pirates.
The much bigger attacker tried to bowl him aside with a well-timed shoulder strike. The strike missed by an inch or two when the Armorer spun away, and the pirate kept coming, stumbling forward off balance.
From behind, Ryan threw his manacled hands over the top of the nasty dreads, pulling the connecting chain down over the filthy face, down around the unprotected throat. Then he crossed his wrists, pulling the chain tight under the man’s chin and making links dig deep into his flesh. The pirate tried frantically to buck him off, but Ryan wouldn’t allow it. By shifting his weight, he kept the man off balance, even as his face turned darker and darker purple.
Sputtering for breath, the pirate reached to his hip for the handle of his machete. As the long, wide blade cleared its scabbard, Ryan gave the chain a vicious twist. There was momentary resistance to the turn, then the neck snapped and the head lolled over onto the left shoulder. Suddenly, Ryan was supporting the full weight of a twitching body. As Ryan un-crossed his wrists, letting his stinking captive fall, Jak snatched the machete from the dead hand.
Two pirates rushed in from the other side with whips cocked back. Mildred and Doc raised cuffed hands to keep from being lashed across the face, and braced to absorb the punishment and protect the emaciated teen behind them.
“It’s the boy!” Mildred shouted to the others over the cheers of the crowd. “They don’t want us, they want the boy!”
Jak was already in motion, coiled like a steel spring, the gut-hook machete almost dragging the bed floor as he maximized momentum. The chop when it came was far too fast to follow—an arcing, angled blow that landed behind the nearest pirate’s right knee. The machete’s edge cleaved deep into bone but the battle armor shin guard kept it from slicing all the way through. The blade stuck fast, and the weapon was jerked free of Jak’s hand as the pirate leaped backward. When the man’s full weight came down, the weakened bone gave way with an audible crack.
The pirate screamed and fell over backward, clawing at his newly fashioned, blood-jetting stump, and before the second attacker could jump away, Mildred and Doc were on him. Mildred grabbed hold of the end of the whip. Doc smashed him across the face with both hands locked, like he was swinging a baseball bat or an ax. As the man staggered back half a step, Doc seized him around the front of the throat, driving him into the wall of the stake truck. Displaying a reservoir of strength and the bottomless depth of his anger, the Victorian time-traveler lifted the 180-pound pirate up on his tiptoes as he strangled him, two-handed. Doc absorbed the man’s frantic punches and kicks, his excellent teeth bared in a terrible, triumphant grin.
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
