Plague Lords. James Axler

follow the blood scent like a homing beacon.

      “Quick!” Ryan growled, waving Doc after him as he raced back toward the campfire.

      When they got there, they shouldered as many of the loaded backpacks as they could carry. As Ryan ran from the rubble field, over the sounds of the idling dirt bikes, he realized Jak’s motorcycle still wouldn’t start.

      “Leave it!” Ryan shouted through a cupped hand. “Come on! Over here!”

      The albino youth let the machine drop to the ground. Mildred passed her bike to him and climbed on the seat behind J.B. Krysty already had her motorcycle moving. When she roared up, Doc and Ryan jammed a couple of backpacks in the cargo rack, then battened them down with bungees. There was no time to check the contents.

      “Gaia, what’s that smell!” Krysty exclaimed as solo-riding Jak, and J.B. and Mildred joined them.

      “Hundreds of stickies copulating,” Doc announced.

      “Down there?” Mildred said, pointing toward the drop-off and the riverbed.

      “Oh, yeah,” was Ryan’s answer.

      While he and Doc were tying down the backpacks, J.B. thumbed high brass shells into the loading port of his M-4000 as fast as he could. When the mag was plugged, he racked the action to chamber a round, stuffed a final shell in the port, then passed the scattergun back to Mildred.

      “Stop for nothing,” Ryan told the others as he climbed on the seat behind Krysty. “All we’ve got going for us is speed and surprise. That means staying on the existing path.” He adjusted the Steyr strapped across his back, then unholstered his SIG. “If we try to break fresh trail and go around them, we might dump the bikes. If that happens, they’ll swarm us and we’re dead meat. J.B., let’s go!”

      The Armorer screwed down his fedora, then roared away with Mildred pressed against his back. As Krysty and passenger Ryan, and Jak and passenger Doc followed, the lead bike vanished over the verge of the chasm. A few seconds later, the 12-gauge boomed.

      Mildred was doing more than riding shotgun.

      Krysty slowed a little to keep from going airborne when they hit the drop-off. As soon as the front wheel pointed down, she opened the throttle wide in second gear. The slope was steep, the dished-out path worn smooth. Along with the gut-wrenching acceleration, wind howled past Ryan’s ears and whipped at his clothes and his one good eye. Stickies who had been driven off the trail by J.B.’s passing and the shotgun blast watched dumbfounded by the combination of velocity and shrill engine noise.

      As Krysty hurtled toward the stickie-covered pillars, Ryan leaned to the side and glimpsed Mildred standing on the dirt bike’s footpegs, knees bent, left hand firmly gripping the back of J.B.’s coat collar. Holding the scattergun by the pistol grip with her right, she aimed straight ahead. Another boom rang out. The spray of close-range buckshot momentarily cleared the road of obstacles, exploding a stickie’s head like a liquid-filled piñata.

      Hunched over the fuel tank, Krysty shifted to third and wound the engine to redline, leaving Ryan’s stomach far behind. He didn’t know how fast they were going—he couldn’t see the speedometer—but it felt like ninety. Firing his weapon was out of the question. He couldn’t do anything but hang on.

      If the muties had thrown their bodies at the bikes, they could have made them crash. Suicide in the service of chilling was certainly in their repertoire. If the strategy had occurred to them, before they could act on it, the six companions were already past the pillar bases in a screaming blur.

      Dead ahead, J.B.’s brake lights flashed on, the bike shimmied as it slowed and Mildred sat down hard. Coming up on them too fast, Krysty hit her brakes, too, then downshifted an instant before they bounced into the riverbed, skidding across the loose stream gravel. To keep her from laying down the motorcycle, Ryan slammed down his left boot. Feathering the throttle and the brake, Krysty regained control and righted the bike, then she rocketed them up the much more gradual incline on the far side of the riverbed.

      When Ryan glanced behind, he saw Jak powering up the slope through the dust cloud they had raised. Lanky Doc was perched on the seat behind the diminutive albino, his shoulder-length gray hair and the tails of his frock coat flapping in the breeze. With his boots propped on the footpegs, Doc’s knees were level with Jak’s shoulders. Ryan thought they looked like a radblasted carny act.

      At the crest of the grade, there was nothing but open road ahead of the companions, stickie-free and string-straight.

      Unable to contain his glee, J.B. accelerated away from the others like a madman. Holding down his treasured hat with one hand, throwing back his head, he hollered “Yeehah!” at the top of his lungs.

      Chapter Three

      Under the wide brim of a straw planter’s hat, Okie Moore squinted through rubber-armored minibinocs. Behind him, fixed to the rusting rail, a tattered, homemade Lone Star flag snapped in the onshore breeze. From his vantage point atop the Yoko Maru’s radar mast—some twelve stories above the main deck, five stories above the roof of the wheelhouse, almost four hundred feet above ground—he could see twenty nautical miles. The cheap Taiwanese optics were never quite in focus—if one eye was sharp, the other was slightly blurred—but they were good enough to spot a telltale blip along the seam between white-capped Gulf and cloudless blue sky. So far, there was nothing to see, but the combination of fuzzy images and the glare of the midday sun had given him the beginnings of a monumental headache. It felt like someone had inserted a flexible steel rod up his right nostril and then corkscrewed it through his sinus passages until the pointy tip bored into the nerves behind his eyeball.

      Okie hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours, not since the trader’s sloop beating in from the southwest had dropped sail and coasted slowly through the sheltered anchorage on the Corpus side of the island, the black plastic, trash bag pennants on its headstay fluttering like dying crows. From the cockpit, through a megaphone, the skipper shouted a warning to the beach and the handful of moored ships. The three-man crew had seen Browns ville from a distance. It was a funeral pyre, set alight by the Matachìn.

      Until that moment, only droolies had taken the Fire Talker’s stories seriously.

      “How long ago?” someone along the shore had shouted back.

      “Four days.”

      “Stop!” the islanders cried. “Stop! Heave to!”

      The sloop continued coasting east, the captain steering with one hand and holding the megaphone in the other.

      “Are the pirates coming this way?” Okie had bellowed, running along the sand to keep up.

      “Who knows?” was the reply. “Could be a day behind, or three hours behind. Or mebbe they took their spoils south. Not sticking around to find out. If you got any brains, you won’t, either.” The skipper tossed down the megaphone, and to his waiting crew he snarled the order “Up sail!”

      The sheets filled with a resounding whipcrack and the ship accelerated away. The captain never once looked back.

      The three predark vessels moored in the cove began immediate, frantic preparations to weigh anchor. Ignoring the shouts and curses of the islanders, the ships’ crews had pushed half-loaded dinghies from the beach and rowed away. The only evacuation on the traders’ minds was their own. As soon as the dinghies had been hoisted aboard, without even stowing cargoes belowdecks, the two battered Tartans and the Catalina winched up their hooks, raised all sails and left the Padre Islanders to meet their fate.

      After the observation and blasterposts that ringed the perimeter had been alerted, the heads of the Nuevo-Texican founding families and their lieutenants, Okie included, met in emergency session in the Yoko Maru’s windowless galley. They had planned to dump the Fire Talker on the mainland shore that very day. Now they didn’t dare. There were unanswered questions about how he had managed to reach Padre so quickly on foot. If he was a pirate spy, and they turned him loose, he could report back on the island’s fortifications and armament. Some of the headmen