in the hope that the experience would give him something truly original and important to write about, and allow him to stake his claim to fame and wealth.
Long before nukeday’s dawn, things had gone very wrong on the remote prison island. During the course of the black box-funded experiments, his blood became infected with an engineered virus of unheard-of and unstoppable lethality, but to which he was immune. He had been offered a choice by the facility’s whitecoats: to live out the rest of his life in isolation on the island hellhole or to go into cryogenic sleep until a cure could be found.
When he was reanimated more than one hundred years later, he was shocked to learn that there was still no cure for the virus in his blood; that in the interim the civilized world had blown itself apart and that he was to be deployed as a walking biological weapon by the tenth-generation offspring of the penal colony’s original rapists and murderers.
Through the narrow air vent, the clamor of the crowd crescendoed. The pirates had begun their victory lap around Veracruz’s central square.
Daniel lowered his forehead to his upraised knees, and then thumped it upon them, hard, over and over again. After all the effort he’d made and the pain he’d endured, what in his life had changed?
He still got no credit for his heroic deeds, only now the body count he created was real, and he wasn’t paid a penny in compensation. He still lived in a hole, only now it was under even worse conditions. He had a bucket for a toilet and no toilet paper. He ate with his fingers out of an old tin can. No TV or skin mags for companionship. No showers. Whether imprisoned belowdecks or walking free as a plague vector, he was still looked down upon by everyone he met—everyone except the droolies. He’d always been able to count on the droolies.
Though as far as he knew there were no more novels of any kind being published, though he had no writing instruments or paper, that didn’t stop him from attempting to compose great works of destiny in his mind. But unhappily, no matter the starting point, all his epic, original ideas eventually turned into Slaughter Realms books. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the series and the characters out of his head. Perhaps it was a function of his having written so many of them? Or perhaps cryogenesis had permanently damaged his creative synapses.
Sooner or later, the characters started to banter and jive like the series’ regulars. Instead of the vast, labyrinthine conspiracies he envisioned himself writing, the stories devolved into highly detailed, sword and gun fights, and the occasional extraneous, space-filling sexual romp. Heads parted company with necks; cranial contents Jackson-Pollacked opposing mud-plastered walls and ceilings; bowels tumbled steaming from torsos in fat gray coils; and sweat-lubricated bodies writhed in ecstasy and exploded in impossible joy.
In sum, his 137 years of existence had been nothing less than a classic, wall-to-wall fuck up.
More pain and suffering awaited him because his lifeblood was still valuable to his masters; or to be more specific, the marrow in his bones was valuable. Daniel was the only plague vector who’d survived the Deathlands adventure. All the other fire talkers, gaudy sluts and traveling tinkers had perished, either at the hands of the enemy or thanks to an overabundance of friendly fire. Without enanos, their infected ones, the Lords of Death couldn’t maintain their stranglehold on the Central American city-states. For their part, the Matachìn didn’t care how many of the enanos died, or how it happened. The only accounting of casualties came from Commander Casacampo, and he could make up any story that suited him.
A very long time ago, while Tooby was still an ice cube with hair, the Lords of Death were just a band of Matachìn, themselves—simple, brutal seafaring pirates. They had elevated themselves to godhood by being the first to control the plague and then apply it to the battlefield.
There was a roar at Daniel’s back; the tug’s diesels were starting up. He felt a lurch of movement as the tug turned away from the pier.
The next leg of his long journey about to begin.
The journey back to hell.
Chapter Five
At blasterpoint, Ryan crossed the footbridge and passed through the iron gate, which opened onto a narrow, dank, stone corridor. The passage was lit by a string of bare, dim bulbs draped along the ridge of the ceiling. Ryan guessed the walls were at least five or six feet thick—thick enough to stop a sixteenth-century cannonball.
From behind came the clanks of chains and the sounds of boots scraping on the limestone floor; the other slaves were being hurried along by the Matachìn.
When Ryan, High Pile and their escort exited the corridor’s far end, they stepped out into the corner of a huge courtyard. Harsh light from the battlements illuminated the long colonnades on either side. On the left, the structure was faced with red brick; on the right it was naked limestone. Through the room-size arches on that side, Ryan could see the exterior wall and the gated entrance to the fort’s dock. The three masts of a large sailing ship were visible above it. Stretching out before them was a grassy sward. A two-story building blocked the far end, its rows of tall windows overlooking the courtyard.
Immense, sculpted stone heads of the various Atapuls guarded the colonnades’ entrances, ten heads to a side, glaring across the sward at one another. As Ryan walked on, he saw evidence of other recent human sacrifices. Fist-size gobbets of blackening flesh lay on the ground at the base of each of the idols.
Excised hearts. Twenty of them in all.
Along the left-hand wall were the rest of the remains, torsos in one heap, heads in another.
It smelled like a charnel house, and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the death stench inside the compound.
A group of eight men awaited them in front of the building at the end of the courtyard. Seven were robed and head-dressed priests, led by none other than the hairless spider himself. Ryan glanced up at the battlements on either side, three stories above. They were lined with red sashes. Close to three hundred of the sec men, he reckoned. All armed. All looked down at the spectacle.
The pirate commander advanced the last twenty feet by himself. Ignoring the priests, he knelt in front of the eighth man, who apparently outranked them all.
At first Ryan thought the guy was wearing an elaborate mask over his face, then he realized it was his face.
The one-eyed warrior had seen plenty of disfigurements in Deathlands. Some were accidental; some were battle scars like his own; some were hard punishment meted out for crimes; some were purely decorative. This one was in a league of its own.
A living fright mask.
The corners of the man’s mouth had been surgically extended deep into his cheeks, and the lips excised top and bottom, this to reveal inch-and-a-half-long fangs of gold where his canine teeth had once been. It gave him a permanent, awful, stylized grin, like the Atapul heads. Evenly spaced welts of purple, scarified tissue bridged his nose and cheeks, making them look corrugated, like a boar’s snout. Unlike the Atapul representations, his tongue wasn’t pointed or a foot long. His high-piled dreads were caged in a ceremonial headdress. The breastplate of his gilded battle armor was spattered with drops of fresh blood.
At a hand signal from the pirate captain, the Matachìn pushed Ryan forward, then kicked him behind the knees to make him kneel before their headman’s headman.
Fright Mask addressed the audience of pirates, priests, red sashes and prisoners in a booming voice, punctuated by punches thrown at the night sky. Ryan couldn’t understand
