Dark Resurrection Read Online Free Page B

predark books. Long before Armageddon, they had been handed out to reservation Indians to make them sick and wipe them out. The how of what had happened at Padre was a mystery that might never be solved, but Harmonica Tom was damn well sure the appearance of the plague was no coincidence.
    The objective of the invasion by sea hadn’t been simple, familiar robbery, either. The Matachìn had blown apart the beached freighter that contained all of the islanders’ worldly goods, and having done that, they just left it to burn, as if it held nothing worth stealing. The objective apparently had been the destruction of all life and property. Tom took that as an insult to Deathlands, and to the best of its hard-pressed survivors. Moreover, he took it as a personal affront.
    And then there was the matter of Ryan Cawdor and his five companions.
    No doubt about it, he had dragged those good folks into a world of trouble and hurt. They’d wanted to head east to off-load the 125-pound cache of C-4 they’d snatched, but he’d told them they’d get a better price if they sailed west and dealt with the Padre Islanders. When the shit hit the fan on Padre, things had broken badly for Cawdor and the others. They were still alive when Tom had hightailed it for Tempest, but the last he’d seen of them, they were pinned down by pirates who were closing in fast. If they had managed to live through the assault, they would have been taken as slaves for thegalley ships. In the three weeks since Tom had made his solo escape, they could have all died at their oars.
    Death en route was a definite possibility.
    More than once he had come across big-ass sharks lazily schooling around a headless floating torso with flesh hanging from it in a pale, bloodless fringe. Every time he saw the rad-blasted black fins circling on the surface, he’d divert course to see if it was anyone he knew.
    Harmonica Tom had a very straightforward rule for survival that had proved itself over the years: when the odds were good, hit; when the odds were shit, git.
    No way could he fight the convoy at sea and hope to win. There were too many opposing vessels, and three of them had massive diesels and twice his speed. If he tried to engage them in open water with Tempest, he knew he’d be outmaneuvered in no time and once committed to the attack, he’d never escape.
    In one sense, the farther south he sailed the longer the odds got; in another sense, they actually improved. Though he had penetrated deep into Matachìn territory, nobody in these parts had ever heard of Harmonica Tom. Off his ship he would be unrecognizable, even to the pirates he had outcaptained and outfought along the treacherous Texican shoals. And if the pirate cities were jam-packed with people like the fire talkers said, that gave him the advantage of invisibility. A man who was careful and quiet could get lost in a crowd.
    From the angle of the ship lights relative to the shore, Tom figured the convoy was going to make its first landfall at Veracruz. He backed the throttle to idle but left the engine in gear, then lashed off the helm to maintain a steady course. He’d had three weeks to consider the best plan of action.What he’d come up with involved taking some big chances, but none of them were new.
    It was called going for broke.
    He opened and swung back the cockpit door, then turned to the box-fed, Soviet PKM pivot mounted on Tempest ’s stern rail. Unlocking the canvas-shrouded machine gun from its swivel, he carried it down the steep steps to the cabin. He removed the shroud, then fitted the weapon onto the sandbagged tripod already set up at the foot of the stairs. He opened the feed cover to make sure there wasn’t a round chambered. After angling the barrel up to cover the entryway above and cockpit beyond, he locked the elevation.
    Tom scrambled up the stairs and attached the end of a steel trip wire to an eye-screw on the inside of the open door. Descending again, he fed the wire