Dark Resurrection

All three bared their teeth as they leaned hard into unison strokes, struggling to make way against the gathering headwind and jumbled seas.

J.B. couldn’t count the number of times he and his friends had been taken prisoner, but this time was different. The specific details of being exposed to the elements, starved, beaten, forced to eat, sleep and shit shackled to oars was unimportant. What mattered was, each pull southward took them farther away from everything they knew, from everything they believed in, and brought them that much closer to the truth about their place in the larger scheme of things.

So far the truth didn’t look all that promising.

During the companions’ multiday voyage east from Port Arthur ville to Padre Island, Harmonica Tom had passed on rumors about pockets of predark civilization thriving in the southern latitudes nearly untouched by nuke strikes. Were the Matachìn pirates a scouting party from a much more advanced, a much more populous culture? Was it possible that a complex, industrialized society had existed side by side with Deathlands ever since nukeday? If that was indeed the case, then J.B. knew he and his comrades faced an adversary with overwhelming advantages, an adversary that could chew them up like weevils in porridge. And there was no guarantee that any of the success strategies hard-won in the hellscape would save them.

The Armorer, who had fought on the winning side in dozens of campaigns and a thousand skirmishes, felt both helpless and insignificant. Being short of stature, he found those feelings particularly grating. The lack-of-size business was something he had lived with his entire life, and he’d come to terms with it by making himself extramean and extraquick. He’d been mean enough and fast enough to hold his own alongside Deathlands’s most famous warriors: Trader, Poet and Ryan Cawdor. In fact, Trader had often bragged around the convoy campfire that J.B. was the kind of sawed-off, fearless little bastard who would climb up your chest, stand on your shoulders and beat in your head with his gun butt.

The idea of being swallowed up by distance, technology and scale, of being truly, unutterably lost was no longer an abstract concept to J.B. Now he knew what Ryan had experienced when he had been singled out and spirited off to Shadow World. The lesson Ryan had learned on that overpopulated parallel Earth was to keep his head down and wait for an opportunity. No matter how bleak and impossible things looked in the present, to trust in fate that the seam would appear.

The cloud looming before them cast a vast shadow, turning the water beneath it inky-black. Over the coxswain’s drumbeat and the steady creak and splash of the oars, J.B. could hear the shrill hiss of heavy rain falling on the sea. As the sound of the downpour grew louder and louder, the headwind shrieked and the air temperature plummeted. J.B. shivered uncontrollably in his wet clothes, clenching his jaws to keep his teeth from chattering.

Then it was upon them, roaring.

An impenetrable curtain of rain swept over the tug’s bow. The volume of water was astounding, as was its power. It came down like a waterfall, hammering the metal awnings, flash-flooding the scuppers.

The tug wallowed through steep troughs, pressing deeper into the darkness and the din. Cold rain in a wave slammed down on J.B.’s fedora and shoulders, and again his knees almost gave way, this time from the sheer weight of the torrent. As he struggled to keep his feet, the deck lights above him snapped on.

At least it wasn’t chem rain, he thought.

This was drinkable water.

The five-gallon buckets filled in no time. The deck-watch forced the slaves to pass them hand to hand down the file and dump them into the stern’s freshwater holding tank. Again and again, the process was repeated, buckets allowed to fill to the brim and handed down the line. When the tank was finally topped off, the Matachìn sealed the hatch shut, then ducked back under an awning to escape the cascade’s pummeling.

The conga line had nowhere to go.

The tug didn’t immediately turn out from under the cloud and let her two sister ships have a go at filling their tanks. Its course and speed held it stationary beneath the downpour, leaving the linked slaves to flounder and slide, gasping from the concentration of water vapor in the air. J.B. groaned as his feet went out from under him and he hit the deck hard. Though he had cradled his ribs with his arms, trying to protect them, white-hot pain lanced through his torso.

On his knees, fighting for breath, J.B. squinted up at the wheelhouse, two stories above the main deck. He glimpsed the pirate captain leaning out through 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.