Dark Resurrection Read Online Free Page A

the convoy again after sundown.
    No problem this night, though.
    The Matachìn ships were under engine power; even the slave galley tugs were burning diesel. And they were heading in toward the coast, making for the corona of shimmering lights low on the horizon.
    By Tom’s map reckoning, it had to be Veracruz.
    It was starting to look like the fire talkers’ stories were all true. That there really was a wider and more prosperous world than Deathlands, existing invisibly, simultaneously, from nukeday forward.
    When he had first heard the tales of civilization’s survival in the south, Tom had wanted to get in on the ground floor, to be the first to establish peaceful commerce, to forge trade links with the more advanced culture, and thereby get his hands on some of its fabled material wealth. But after seeing what the dreadlocked emissaries of that culture had done to Padre Island, the entrepreneurship fantasies vanished. Payback had become his single-minded goal.
    And payback was his forte.
    Like other Deathlands traders, Harmonica Tom Wolf had committed his share of morally questionable deeds over the years—some might even call them “atrocities.” It was part of staying in business, and staying alive. He had systematically eliminated rivals trying to encroach on his territory. He had closed deals with hot lead and cold steel instead of smiles and handshakes. He had transported cargos of uncut jolt and high explosives without thinking twice. He had never purposefully messed with women and kids, though. And when he had sent another trader or coldheart on the last train west, it had always been a chill-or-be-chilled situation, and it was usually face-to-face, if not nose-to-nose.
    The horror he had seen at Padre had transformed him, and not in a good way. Images of the dead and dying in that shantyville were branded into the root of his brain. Whenever he managed to grab a few winks of sleep, they invariably shook him awake. He came to gasping for air, spitting mad, fingersclawing for the butt of his stainless-steel .45 Smith wheelgun, looking around for someone to chill.
    The Nuevo-Texicans’ passing hadn’t been quick or clean, not like getting shot or stabbed or fragged by shrap. They had disintegrated from the inside out, cooked in their skins by fever, laying helpless in pools of their own bodily waste. These were folks he’d done business with for years. Folks he respected. He even knew their kids by name. Kids who’d died the same awful way. He’d had three weeks to stew over what had happened to them, and why.
    From the evidence on the scene it looked like disease had ravaged more than half the population before the pirates showed up. Tom had never seen or heard of anything like it. Of the islanders who were stricken by the plague, no one recovered. It was one hundred percent debilitating and one hundred percent fatal. And that wasn’t the whole story. The outbreak had peaked just in time for the naval assault and invasion.
    An unlucky turn of fate?
    Harmonica Tom didn’t think so.
    The Nuevo-Texicans were anything but pushovers. Every man, woman and child older than the age of eight could handle a blaster, and they had plenty of ammo and heavy automatic weapons. Through cagey barter they had accumulated some explosives, too—they had a good stock of Claymore anti-pers mines. For thirty years the islanders had successfully defended their grounded freighter and its stores against all comers. The question was, could a small force of Matachìn have overwhelmed the hardened, battle-tested defenses and superior numbers without help from the plague?
    Definitely not, Tom had concluded. The pirates lacked themanpower to take Padre Island hill by hill, and long-distance shelling alone couldn’t do the job.
    Disease as a weapon of war, of conquest, of genocide wasn’t anything new in the history of the planet. Tom remembered reading about small pox–infected blankets somewhere in his shipboard collection of