Dark Resurrection by James Axler Read Free Book Online

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 and carts, spill-over retail that included hot food, cold drinks, live poultry, cigars and rack after rack of new clothing.
    The other side of the avenue was lined with people and hawkers’ carts, too, but there were no buildings, just a row of tall, skinny trees that marked the border of a broad, central park. The park’s pavement was made up of checkerboard marble tiles in white, gray and black. On the other side of thesquare, high above the tops of the trees, stood the floodlit bell tower of a predark cathedral. It dominated the square, glowing in the lights like an ember, fiery red against the night sky.
    As the trucks crept forward, Ryan picked up distinctive odors by turns—camellias, spices, incense, fresh-baked bread, charcoal smoke and grilled meats. This was nothing like Shadow World. That place had been stripped bare by insatiable human appetites, like the ruins of a cornfield after a swarm of locusts. Veracruz was the exact opposite of the parallel earth: it was ripe, fecund, teeming with energy.
    “Oh, my God!” Mildred exclaimed, pointing toward the ground floor of one of the buildings with both manacled hands.
    “What?” Ryan said.
    “It’s a Burger King!” was her cryptic reply.
    Further explanation was interrupted by a barrage of garbage. As the trucks came directly under the balconies, the folks up there stopped throwing confetti and started throwing rotten fruit, to the applause of the surrounding mob. The slaves ducked and covered as overripe mango and papaya splattered the bed of the trucks and their defenseless backs.
    The volley let up only after the convoy had crawled out of range.
    When their truck rounded a corner, Ryan could see it wasn’t the tint of the spotlights that made the cathedral look red; it was painted top to bottom the color of dried blood.
    Or maybe it was blood.
    The mob packing the cathedral steps broke apart before the wedge of Matachìn. The three-truck convoy stopped. High Pile hopped down from the running board and climbed up to the stone altar that blocked the cathedral’s main entrance.Pungent clouds of incense poured from brass censers on either side of the arched doorway.
    An old man with a sagging, deeply seamed face waited for him behind the dished out altar. His headdress was made of scrolled posts and cross-members of gold-painted wood. His brocaded, crimson robe didn’t hide skinny arms and legs, and a round, protruding belly—he looked like a hairless brown spider playing dress-up.
    Ryan noticed that while everybody else retreated with their noses pressed to ground, the spider remained upright, as if he and the commander were equal in rank.
    Pirate and high priest conferred head-to-head for a moment in the cathedral’s entryway, then with a flourish, the priest unsheathed a long, golden dagger that he held over his head and turned for all to see. The captain shouted an order down to his men. Five Matachìn immediately and gleefully swarmed over the sides of the lead stake truck, jumping down into the midst of the chained slaves.
    The pirates booted aside the prisoners, moving with purpose in the same direction, toward Ryan and the others.
    “Together now,” the one-eyed warrior growled as the Matachìn bore down on them in a blitz attack.
    Things