“Cover up!” she shouted.
The warning was almost too late. Knight had barely averted his eyes when several small artificial suns exploded on the road behind them. Bishop had placed six incendiary grenades, daisy-chained with a monofilament trip wire, near the wrecked cars along a quarter-mile stretch of road. To increase the destructive potential of the booby trap, she had punctured the gas tanks of several more cars, saturating the ground with flammable liquid. When the lead wendigo hit the trip wire, detonating the grenades, the resulting firestorm engulfed the dozens that were caught in the midst of the sudden eruption of light and heat.
A few flaming bodies emerged from the firestorm, only to collapse dead after a couple of steps. After that, there was nothing to see for a long time. The pickup stopped, two hundred yards from the edge of the inferno, and Rook got out to assess the damage. It was impossible to say how many had been caught in the flames, or if any more, in their blind hunger, had run heedless into the furnace, but it took less than a minute for some of the creatures to figure out how to go around it.
Suddenly there was another explosion from the midst of the conflagration. Flaming debris erupted in every direction. An entire car rose into the sky in a fireball. At first, Bishop thought it was a fuel tank going up, but then something emerged from the heart of the inferno.
It was an alpha.
The beast moved quickly, running through the flames like a firewalker crossing a bed of coals. There were carbon black streaks on its flanks, but it did not appear to have suffered any injuries from the heat.
“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Rook said. His triumphant grin slipped a notch when a second alpha burst from the flames. He took a step back toward the truck. “I think maybe we should go now.”
A third alpha wendigo came through, close on the heels of the other two.
Rook vaulted into the bed and rapped his fist on the cab roof. “Go!”
Bulldog got the message. The pickup took off with a squeal of rubber on pavement, but the truck was no sports car. The alphas, with their ten foot stride, covered the intervening distance with astonishing speed.
Bishop aimed the machine gun at the feet of the leading alpha and opened up. The creature waved its monstrous arms as if swatting flies.
Knight fired the CheyTac. His bullet punching into the thing’s skull with the force of a sledge hammer blow, throwing up a geyser of blood. The wendigo stumbled, but then shook its weirdly-shaped head, as if shrugging off a run-in with an open cupboard door, and resumed its pursuit, pounding forward with heavy steps that shook the earth. In a matter of just a few seconds, it was close enough that Bishop could see its jagged teeth and the great pink maw of its jaws. She aimed into it and pulled the trigger again.
The top of the long, featureless skull blew apart. The alpha reared back abruptly then collapsed like its bones had turned to jelly.
“Lucky shot,” Rook grumbled, as he continued pumping rounds from both Desert Eagles into the legs of the next monstrous alpha. Bishop hoped he was wrong. She swiveled her gun to the creature Rook was engaging and raked it with a burst while Knight sent one bullet after another into the head of the third.
The gun fell silent, the ammo belt completely fired out.
She looked around for another canvas drum magazine but quickly realized that the battle would be over, one way or another, before she could reload. Beck was on her knees next to Rook, firing the SCAR into the jaws of the nearest alpha, but with less effectiveness than Bishop’s fire.
The creature stumbled, the bones of one leg smashed by Rook’s bullets and no longer able to bear weight. It sprawled forward on its belly, sliding with enough momentum to almost kiss the pickup’s bumper. The third alpha appeared to be on a collision course with the thrashing form, but just as it was about to be tripped up, the creature flexed its massive legs and leaped over the crippled alpha. The jump supplied just enough momentum to launch the creature into a low arc, and as it sailed through the air, Bishop saw that its trajectory would inevitably bring it down right on top of the pickup.
58
Huitzilopochtli feasted.
There was food aplenty on the road that lay before him. Men and women, families, trapped in a line of unmoving cars that stretched to the horizon. He tore the vehicles open and plucked out the occupants inside as easily as one might crack a walnut. Some of them began to change immediately, and these he permitted to live; after all, were they not also Huitzilopochtli? The rest, he tore apart and devoured.
As he consumed more human flesh, his earthly form grew larger, and so also did his ravenous, insatiable hunger.
There was a part of him that remembered being Hector Beltran, but his transformation into Huitzilopochtli, had begun long before the metamorphosis of his flesh. It had started merely as an act of adolescent defiance, repudiating the tired old traditions of his Catholic forbears by willfully engaging in the savagely violent practices of earlier ancestors, or rather, what he imagined those rituals to be.
Killing was easy. In the world of Los Zetas, it was a routine occurrence, hardly more noteworthy than swatting a fly. But to eat the flesh of a conquered adversary? That was something that, once done, could never be undone, and so was the perfect symbol of the new life he would make for himself. Yet, until that first taste, he had not truly understood what it would mean. It had been like stepping through a door into another life. The power of the ancient god had awakened within him, and set him on a path to a destiny greater than anything the cartel could offer. The wealth his fellow narcotraficantes craved was ephemeral, a goal unworthy of the god he aspired to be.
Like the Aztec emperor Tlacaelel, who had elevated Huitzilopochtli from the status of minor tribal deity to the highest position in the Nahua pantheon, and in so doing, had elevated the Aztecs to a position of divine favor, Beltran had reimagined the worship of Huitzilopochtli. Instead of offering sacrifices to keep the sun burning in the heavens, Beltran and his followers would consume the flesh of their enemies in a ritual communion, which would allow their god to reside within them.
Although he continued to control one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in the Americas, he saw these illicit endeavors merely as a means to an end, and that end was the complete transformation into Huitzilopochtli. He began to crave human flesh the way some men crave sex, and when he learned of the Algonquin legend of the windigo, he began to believe that a literal transformation was indeed possible. If the legends were true, it had happened before. He would make it happen again with an offering of flesh.
He had made it happen.
That the windigo might be the result of a contagion—a virus or some similar microbial organism—did not occur to him, nor would it have mattered. He was no scientist, but a true believer. He did experiment, first with the wild boars, which grew fat on what remained of those he sacrificed, along with a cocktail of hormones and steroids. He used the money from his illicit activities to establish the restaurant chain where he mixed in the meat of wild pigs, fattened on human flesh, with that of domestic livestock. While the experiment did not yield the desired results, it was extremely profitable and had the patina of legitimacy, which had laid the foundation for what would follow. And that had worked exactly as planned. Now, all that remained was to leave this island behind and reach one of the nearby cities. The roads would take him where he needed to go, and there would be no shortage of people who had, unknowingly, already shared in the great communion with Huitzilopochtli.
The part of him that was still Beltran knew this. The feast now set before him was nothing compared to what awaited him on the other side of the water. His offerings had spread across the southern United States. Thousands of people, millions, had unknowingly eaten portions of tainted meat. It would take only a touch to make them like him. He would lead an army of windigos to devour the world.
But first, he would have to cross the water.
He was faintly aware of gunfire behind him. Several of the smaller w
indigos, those who had only recently changed and were driven purely by the primal need to eat, broke off and headed in the direction of the disturbance. He let them go. While they had answered his call, like wolves joining a pack and submitting to the will of the alpha male, he did not control them, nor did he care to. They served his purpose regardless of whether they stayed in his shadow. At first, just a few raised their heads and turned toward the shooting. Then the rest joined in the stampede, choosing to risk the guns of victims in the open, over the less certain prospect of waiting for scraps to fall from their great leader’s mouth.
He was Huitzilopochtli; he did not fear humans or their guns, but their presence did concern him. They were a threat that would have to be dealt with. When he felt the fire on his back, he realized that the threat behind them might be more significant than he had first believed. The others, his trusted lieutenants who had come with him from Mexico, turned back to deal with the attackers, but the only thing that mattered to him was what lay ahead.
Something was happening. On the five-mile-long span across the water, the cars were moving. Nearly half the bridge was cleared, and in the moment that it took him to realize this, several more cars began moving, accelerating to top speed in their haste to escape the island.
He struggled to understand the significance of this development, but could grasp nothing beyond the fact that his prey was slipping away. He reached down, snatched up a car and ripped its roof off in his hands. He no longer perceived the world visually, but his other senses, hearing and smell especially, painted the world more vividly than anything he had ever seen with his eyes.
Although they were screaming in terror, the people in the car were ready for the change. He opened his jaws and made a hissing sound, not to threaten but rather to spray some of his saliva on them. That was all it took. A bit of spittle, a drop of sweat, even the touch of a misshapen hand.
In seconds, they were windigos, slavering in anticipation of their first meal as manifestations of Huitzilopochtli. But he did not set them loose right away. Instead, he turned his attention to the bridge, where still more vehicles were slipping away. Only a few still remained, their engines revving in anticipation of the long run to freedom.
Curious, he started forward, picking up speed until his enormous feet were thundering against the bridge deck. One foot caught a fleeing car and sent it tumbling down the road like a toy kicked by a mischievous child, but the others accelerated away. Soon he had matched the pace of the escaping cars, but they were no longer of interest to him. All that mattered was crossing the water and reaching the far side.
Suddenly, the bridge deck lurched beneath him with such force that he was thrown back. His powerful hands closed involuntarily, crushing the already damaged vehicle in his right fist, pulverizing the recently changed windigos within. He barely took note of their fate. An instant later, a blast of intense heat radiated across him, followed by a storm of dust and debris.
He remembered enough of his former life to recognize an explosion.
Some of the fragments tore into his skin, but he shrugged the inconsequential injury off as easily as his former self might ignore the bite of a mosquito. He was back on his feet before the last echoes of the detonation died away. A portion of the bridge had been destroyed. He could hear the tumult of its collapse, smell the residue of explosives and the acrid tang of burning metal and petrochemicals.
He started forward again, moving cautiously now lest more of the damaged span collapse underfoot. A gap of at least fifty yards now separated him from his goal. Several idling military vehicles waited there, along with at least a score of soldiers.
Something stung his skin, and he heard the crack of a rifle report. The soldiers were shooting at him. The bullets were merely an irritation, but he knew that there might be other, more dangerous weapons in their arsenal.
He drew back and hurled the crushed remains of the vehicle across the gap. The car flew like a guided missile, smashing into one of the military trucks, even as the soldiers scattered before it. There was a pause in the volley of gunfire as the men tried to regroup, but disrupting the attack had not been his primary goal.
The firing resumed, but he ducked his head, weathering the assault as he waited for his counter-attack to bear fruit.
He did not have to wait long.
It had taken only a few drops of blood, spattered from the collision of the car he had thrown at the soldiers, falling on the exposed skin of just one man who had unknowingly partaken of the offering to Huitzilopochtli. Even from a distance, he could tell that nearly all of the soldiers had eaten and would change if exposed. He heard more shots fired but none of the bullets were aimed at him, and after a few seconds, the guns fell silent.
A score of windigos now stood on the far shore, feasting on what remained of the soldiers who had been killed before they too could be changed.
He felt a mild thrill of satisfaction, but simply having some of the lesser ones on the other side was not enough. He paced at the edge of the gap, testing its stability, gauging the distance as precisely as he could, and then, he jumped.
59
Queen throttled back the boat as they slipped through the narrow mouth of Mill Tail Creek and into the dark woods of the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge. Black tupelo and cypress trees growing out of the marsh to either side obscured the point at which solid ground gave way to wetland.
King peered into the shadowy woods, trying to imagine how the area would have appeared three hundred years earlier. Despite the fact that the eastern seaboard had been occupied for millennia, there were still a lot of places that were much the same as they had been before the arrival of European colonists: inhospitable wilderness. The low-lying peninsula between the Alligator River and the Outer Banks was just such a place, which in some ways made it the perfect place for a short-term refuge from an invading force of white settlers with guns, but what about bloodthirsty wendigos that were more animal than human?
“Do you…?” Sara didn’t finish the question, but cocked her head sideways as if sniffing the air or listening, or some strange combination of both.
“What is it?”
“Something.” She shook her head. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something very different about this place.”
“It’s outdoors,” Queen remarked.
King caught the hint of what might have been either annoyance or amusement in Queen’s tone. Sara evidently did not, but continued to gaze out across the water. “Maybe.”
King knew that Sara, with her sensory processing disorder, was probably feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of sensations, sounds and smells that existed nowhere in the climate controlled environs favored by modern humans. Yet, he also knew that Sara’s unique perspective afforded her insights about the various stimuli she experienced that were not immediately apparent to others.
The GPS signaled their arrival at the target coordinates, but there was little else to distinguish the section of the creek. Queen steered into a narrow channel that was barely wide enough to accommodate the boat. A dirt road ran parallel to the channel, and there was a small dock about a hundred yards up the course. When Queen pulled alongside it, King hopped out and tied the boat off.
“I thought there was supposed to be a city here,” Queen said.
Ellen shook her head. “The city was abandoned in the 1950s. It was originally just a logging camp, built after the Civil War, but during Prohibition it became a boom town because of moonshine production. There were over three thousand people living here, and nearly every one of them was a moonshiner. There was even a boat, the Hattie Creef, that ran ‘shine across the Abelmarle Sound. I’m pretty sure that’s how the Dare Stone ended up all the way north on the Chowan River.”
Whether it was the opportunity to share her expertise, or simply being away from the constant threat posed by the wendigos, Ellen’s mood was greatly improved. “Anyway, the town was always sort of a ramshackle affair. The houses were built wit
h scrap wood, salvaged from the logging operation. The ground is soft and waterlogged, so nothing is very permanent. When Prohibition ended, the town’s main source of revenue disappeared, and gradually, so did the population. Nothing lasts long here. That’s why I don’t think we’re going to find anything to help us. The swamp erased any trace of the Secotan and their refuge hundreds of years ago.”
Sara, who had been staring out into the woods as if entranced, turned to Ellen. “Obviously not every trace. The Dare Stone turned up.”
Ellen conceded the point with a shrug.
King studied the surrounding landscape, trying to visualize—trying to remember—what it had looked like during the time of the Secotan, when the last surviving members of the Lost Colony would have occupied the spot. Why had they chosen this place? It was not the ideal habitat, yet something had drawn them here… Something about this place protected them from the wendigo.
No, that isn’t quite right, he realized. The natives weren’t afraid of the wendigo curse. They had used it like a bio-weapon, exposing the colonists to the contagion. They had probably served it to them in food, knowing full well that if any of the colonists did transform, they would be unable to harm the Secotan men, women and children. The natives had inoculated themselves with some kind of wendigo repellant. Something that the colonists would have known nothing about. Something they kept in their secret refuge.
But what?
Queen shook her head, muttering, “This is…”
She didn’t finish the complaint, but King could fill in the blank. Hopeless? A waste of time?
He was starting to feel the same way.
Sara however appeared to have become energized. She stepped onto the dock and then headed straight out into the woods, as if drawn by an invisible homing beacon, but as soon as she left the dirt road, the tangled understory stopped her cold.
Cannibal Page 30