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 them the war is over,” Mildred translated for them. “Eternal victory for the Kings of Death—or maybe the Lords of Death. And the hero twins are captives.”
“Hero twins?” Krysty said.
“It could be a mythological reference, from ancient Mayan,” Mildred said. “I sort of vaguely remember the term—something to do with their creation story, I think. More than a century ago I did some reading to get ready for an archaeological tour of the major Mayan sites in Mexico and Guatemala. How the phrase applies here and now is beyond me.”
The truck and its human cargo began to roll slowly forward. Out in front, the Matachìn phalanx parted the crowd with unspoken threat. Ryan watched as a wave of prostration broke before them. Regular folk and red sashes alike supplicated themselves, pressing their faces into the ground. This wasn’t a community of equals welcoming home their best and brightest after a successful military campaign; this was a subject people, paying homage.
The convoy proceeded at a walking pace off the pier, past the lighthouse and into the canyon of city streets. High Pile rode the running board, megaphone-assaulting the seemingly endless throng with his news.
Ryan tried to read the sea of brown faces. Mixed in with the overall jubilance, with the mind-numbing cheers, with the legions of fingers pointing excitedly up at him, he saw here and there flickers of shock and even sorrow. The selection of jigged, giant heads-on-sticks was the same as on the pier: there were kings or demons, plague rictus masks and mirror-images of his own bearded visage.
The convoy crawled through a right turn, proceeded a few more blocks and then made a left.
On Ryan’s right, three-and four-story colonial buildings loomed above the narrow street. The wall-to-wall facades were painted in bright pastels—aqua, pink, gold—and draped with spotlighted red banners: stories-long, paint-on-cloth portraits of the array of ferocious kings—or devils. Atapuls I through X varied in skin color and texture, as well as headdress design and height, width of nose, length of extended tongue, and position and shape of fangs.
From every floor, people hung over the Moorishly arched, pillared balconies; some threw brilliantly colored confetti into the air, which fluttered down onto the heads and shoulders of the Matachìn phalanx. Lights burned in every window. At street level, the buildings opened up into cavelike arcades packed with markets and shops. The sidewalks were jammed with spectators
