an open side window, chewing on a stub of fat black stogie as he peered down at them; his dreadlocks were piled high atop his head and laced with golden trinkets. The Matachìn commander reached up to the wheelhouse ceiling for a lanyard.
The ship’s horn unleashed a string of mocking blasts as the chained captives flopped on the deck.
Through the shifting veil of heavy rain, against the glare of the deck lights, J.B. could see the stinking bastard was laughing his head off.
Chapter One
The convoy’s lead tug rumbled onward through the dead-still night. Diesel engines shook the deck under Ryan’s boot soles; thick smoke poured from the twin stacks atop the superstructure, enveloping the stern in caustic particulate. Deep breathing was difficult. The smoke burned his one good eye and it left an awful, scorched petrochemical taste in his mouth.
Way nukin’ better than rowing, though, Ryan told himself. He’d had enough rowing to last him the rest of his life.
Oars shipped, the Matachìn were powering toward what he figured was their ultimate destination.
The Lantic had turned black-glass-smooth under a starry, moonless sky. In the distance, on the starboard side, its oily surface reflected a narrow band made up of brilliant points of light—white, yellow, red, green—dotting, demarcating an otherwise invisible shoreline. As the bow crested the widely spaced swells, the lights lurched skyward then abruptly dropped. Landfall, the first in more than three weeks, drew inexorably closer.
The lights definitely weren’t from fires or torches or anything combustible; Ryan knew that because they didn’t flicker or throb. They glowed steadily.
Which meant electricity.
Massive quantities of electricity.
Power to burn, in fact.
What bobbed ahead of them was no looted carcass of an underground redoubt, no shit-hammered, hand-to-mouth ville, no nuked-out urban ruin. This was a city, as cities were rumored of old, and from more than a mile offshore it looked to be very much alive.
Ryan glanced at the exhausted human forms hunched on the benches around him. In the deck lights, the slaves’ filthy cheeks were streaked by tears, their lips trembling, their eyes wide with fear and panic at the prospect of an unknown fate.
Faced with the self-same prospect, his companions had drawn on the last of their physical and mental reserves, turning hard-eyed, resolute, deadly focused. Like Ryan, Mildred, Doc, Jak, Krysty and J.B. were a breed apart, their spirits tempered in the furnace of continual conflict and bodily risk. Unlike their Deathlander fellow slaves, they had little interest in finding a comfortable hole to hunker down in, nor in shouldering leather traces and dragging an iron-tipped plow over rocky soil, nor in crawling through the radioactive nukeglass massifs in search of predark spoils, nor in selling their considerable fighting skills to the highest-bidding baron. They were addicted to the kind of absolute freedom only the hellscape could provide.
Aboard Tempest, in what now seemed like another life, when Doc had proposed they join Harmonica Tom on a southern hemisphere voyage of discovery, none of them ever dreamed it would be undertaken in chains and at the point of a lash.
Now the impossible situation in which Ryan and his comrades found themselves trapped was about to change.
Maybe for the worse.
Maybe not.
In the latter they saw a crack of daylight.
Ryan nudged Mildred gently with his elbow, nodded toward the crescent of lights, and said, “So, that’s what the world looked like before hellday?”
“Pretty much,” she replied.
From the bench on the far side of Mildred, J.B. leaned forward and asked, “Where in nukin’ hell are we? That’s all still Mex, right?”
“I think it’s Veracruz,” the twentieth-century, physician freezie said. “Or maybe Tampico. They were the two closest big port cities.”
One of the Matachìn deck-watch leaned in under the sheet metal awning beside them. He was tricked out in full battle armor. Hanging by his hands on the pipe strut, he unleashed armpit stench with both barrels. There was spattered blood on the canvas scabbard of his gut-hook machete. It was still wet, and it was most certainly human. Slaves too weak to row routinely got the long edge across the backs of their necks before they were tossed over the side like so much garbage. A crazy triumphant look in his eyes, the pirate spoke rapid-fire down at Mildred. Overhearing the words, the Matachìn idling nearby looked on in amusement.
“What did the bastard say to you?” Ryan asked.
Mildred translated. “He said we’re looking at Veracruz City.”
“He said more than that,” J.B. prompted.
“Yeah, he did,” she admitted. “He said next to his world, Deathlands is nothing but shit, and that we Deathlanders will always be shit.”
“An assessment that might have carried more weight,” Doc remarked aridly from a seat on the bench directly behind them, “had his own hairstyle not been adorned with dried sea gull excreta.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Ryan told the pirate. “We’re shit and you’re not.”
The Matachìn scowled and as he did so his right hand dropped to his hip and the pommel of his braided leather lash. English was beyond him, but tone transcended the language barrier.
Mildred spoke up quickly, putting Ryan’s remark into Spanish. Evidently the sarcasm was lost in translation.
With a satisfied sneer, the pirate turned back to his shipmates.
As the ship angled closer to shore, the lay of the coast gradually revealed itself. The curve of a southward-pointing peninsula became distinct from the landmass immediately behind it. The tug beelined for a blinking green beacon that marked the deep channel at the tip of the breakwater. When the ship rounded the bend into the protection of the harbor, they hit the wall of trapped heat and suffocating humidity radiating off the land.
The ship’s horn blasted overhead; the sister ships behind chimed in, as well, announcing the Matachìn convoy’s triumphant return to what Ryan could only guess was its point of origin.
In the lee of the peninsula, under scattered bright lights on tall stanchions, were the remains of a commercial shipyard—docks and cargo cranes. The scale of the development dwarfed what they had seen at Port Arthur ville. The structures hadn’t escaped Armageddon unscathed, though. It looked like they had been slammed by tidal waves or earthquakes. Most of the metal-frame industrial buildings were flattened to their concrete pads. Towering cargo cranes canted at odd angles; some had toppled into the water. The enormous docks were broken, wide sections of decking were missing; moored to the remnants were a hodge-podge of small trading vessels. Beyond the docks, where the peninsula met the mainland, stood a power plant that was fully operational. Floodlights illuminated clouds of smoke or steam from a trio of tall stacks. Over the noise of the diesels, the complex emitted a steady, high-pitched hum.
The lead tug continued, hugging the inside of the peninsula, passing within a hundred yards of another immense structure—a fortress made of heavily weathered, light gray stone, also dramatically
