Tortured Spirits

by Gregory Lamberson

  “White Zombie” Maria said.

  Jake glanced at her. She had been doing her research.

  “I watched every frigging zombie movie you can think of in the last year.”

  Humphrey raised his eyebrows. “I take it you’ve both seen zonbies?”

  “I’ve just seen their shells,” Maria said. “Jake is the professional zonbie killer.”

  Humphrey bowed to Jake. “Monsieur.”

  “Last night we found a white snake in Maria’s bed,” Jake said. “Is there such a thing as the Church of the White Snake?”

  “Oui. L’église du Serpent Blanc is as widespread as L’église du Serpent Noir, but in recent years it’s been practiced in secret. Malvado had the worship halls burned down to advance his own religion. You won’t see any tattoos of the white snake on Pavot.”

  “I’ve never heard of an all white snake.”

  “The longer you stay here, the more strangeness you will see.”

  Maria leaned forward. “Did someone put that snake in my bed?”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Humphrey said. “The white snake represents white vodou, which is a force for good. If someone did put it there, it was not with the intention of harming you.”

  Jake heard the squeaking of brakes down the street. A moment later, Maria looked past him, her eyes widening, and the couple eating behind them on the patio leapt to their feet.

  “Humphrey!” the woman said, pointing.

  Jake turned around as four men dressed in camouflage military uniforms ran onto the sidewalk two stores down. They wore red berets and carried machine guns.

  When Jake turned back, he saw the woman and the man draw black handguns from the folds of their clothing. A burst of machine gun fire ripped the air before they had a chance to shoot, and they danced like puppets, crimson wounds appearing in their torsos.

  “Run!” Humphrey reached into his tackle box and brought out a Walther PPK.

  Jake and Maria bolted from their seats and onto the patio. Jake jumped over the metal railing and turned to help Maria, but she sailed past him, her handbag trailing her shoulder.

  Humphrey fired two rounds, and the four soldiers ducked behind cars for cover. Maria took off down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, and Jake ran after her. He heard Humphrey’s footsteps behind them.

  “Cross the street!” Humphrey said.

  But Maria continued sprinting toward the nearest corner, and Jake followed.

  Automatic gunfire tore into the trees around them and punched holes in the parked cars.

  Humphrey screamed, and Jake turned around as Maria reached the corner. Humphrey lay facedown in the street, a puddle of blood spreading across his back. He raised his head, making eye contact with Jake, then hurled his gun forward.

  The Walther struck the pavement, and Jake ran for it. He grabbed the weapon, but when he turned to follow Maria, gunfire sparked a line in the street between them, so he headed for the opposite corner across the street. As he rounded that corner, gunfire blew chips off the bricks.

  Flattening his back against the wall, Jake saw Maria standing across the street, face white and mouth open. She stepped forward, and gunfire sparked against the pole of a street sign on the corner. She flinched.

  “Stay back!” Jake said. Crouching low, he peeked around the corner.

  The four soldiers were jogging in their direction in the middle of the street. When they saw him, they kneeled and fired their weapons.

  He ducked as rounds hammered at the bricks. There was no way he could take them out with the little handgun.

  “Jake!”

  Stretching his legs, he leaned sideways and cocked his arm like a discus thrower. Then he hurled the gun across the street. It hit the sidewalk and spun past Maria. She retrieved the semiautomatic and stood facing him.

  “Run!” Jake said, standing.

  “No!”

  “Maybe one of us will make it!”

  “I won’t leave you!” Her face turned bright red.

  “Do it!”

  With tears streaking her face, Maria turned and ran. She glanced over her shoulder at him, then looked ahead and ran faster.

  TWELVE

  With machine guns cracking behind him, Jake took off in the opposite direction as Maria. Whatever street he was on had fewer shops and buildings than Rue de Verger did.

  A group of men drank bottled beer outside a hardware store. One wore a straw hat; all wore stunned expressions. Jake didn’t know if the eruption of gunfire or the sight of a Caucasian man running for his life had startled them. They crowded into the doorway as he ran past them.

  “Run, senor!”

  Jake heard three pops in the distance behind him. The Walther. He prayed Maria would make it.

  As he reached the next corner, a jeep occupied by four soldiers careened around it, cutting through the intersection and passing him.

  “Le voilà!” a soldier said over the engine’s roar.

  Jake turned the corner onto a wide street with buildings spaced far apart. A garbage truck idled up the block, and he pumped his arms as a sanitation worker dumped the contents of a receptacle into the compacter. Hearing the jeep rev its engine behind him, he sprinted around the truck. The engine’s roar grew louder, closer.

  Jake veered to his right, putting the truck between him and the military vehicle as the soldiers unleashed a volley of gunfire. Without slowing down, he ran up the concrete steps of a deserted building with a boarded-up doorway. He ripped the plywood free as the jeep screeched to a stop and backed up.

  With no idea what to expect, he went inside.

  Maria ran down the street, tears streaming from her eyes.

  Goddamn it!

  She didn’t want to abandon Jake without a weapon, but he had ordered her to do so, and she knew he was right. There had been no way for them to reach each other without being torn to pieces by the machine guns.

  Poor Humphrey! She had never seen a man killed before, let alone someone gunned down trying to help her.

  Grateful she had worn sneakers, Maria ran as fast as she could. Thank God she had only resumed smoking two days earlier and still had her wind. Machine guns roared behind her, and bullets ricocheted off a metal mailbox to her left. Ducking into the doorway of a rug store, she turned and fired the Walther three times, driving the soldiers back around the corner. She had never killed anyone, much less soldiers on foreign soil, and she had no intention of starting now.

  Sprinting to the next corner, she turned left, heading in the direction of Coucher du Soleil on a street parallel to Rue de Verger. Maybe she could somehow reach the Fiesta.

  No car keys …

  A woman getting out of a dark green Dodge froze when she saw Maria running straight toward her.

  Raising the gun, Maria angled her body sideways, sandwiching the woman against the open door. “Donne moi tes clefs!” she said in her best French.

  With her face contorting, the woman held out her car keys, which Maria snatched as she threw herself behind the wheel. Tossing the Walther onto the seat beside her, she jammed the key into the ignition, cranked the engine, and stomped on the gas pedal. The Dodge jumped forward, the open door crashing against a parked car and slamming shut.

  Maria sped down the narrow street, machine gun fire shattering the windshields of the parked cars around her. A man with a terrified expression jumped off his bike and hid behind a pickup. Maria knew if she continued down the street another block or two and turned left, passing the area where the soldiers had attacked, she could find her way onto the highway.

  Fuck that.

  Instead, she turned right. By circling that block, she could head toward Rue de Verger.

  Back toward Jake.

  Jake stopped inside the abandoned factory just long enough to get his bearings. Fading sunlight seeped through the tall window spaces, illuminating broken shards of glass on the floor. He had entered an enormous former plant with one gargantuan room opening into another. Fallen bricks and cinde
r blocks surrounded the columns supporting the high ceiling, and gaping holes in the walls permitted views of other rooms.

  At the far end, easily two hundred feet away, he spotted a stairway and ran toward it. His feet crushed glass, kicked gravel, and scraped cement. Green stalactites hung from the ceiling like daggers ready to fall. Hearing footsteps behind him, he angled right so a cracked wall hid him from view. He ducked through a hole in another wall, stepped over the skeleton of a cat, and hurried past a rusted industrial oil tank.

  Men shouted behind him, and he flattened his back against the right wall of the stairway as he charged up the stairs, which were covered with clumps of dirt and debris.

  Reaching the second floor, Jake was surprised to see trees growing in the middle of the floor and through a wide hole in the ceiling. He passed piles of knocked over filing cabinets and found himself in a long corridor with a dirt floor lined with doorways lacking doors. Scavengers had salvaged everything they could. Sunlight glared through an opening in the wall at the end of the corridor. He ran toward the light.

  Excited voices rose from below.

  Entering a room to his right, he ran past an open safe to an empty window space and glanced down at the sidewalk. His stomach tightened.

  Three jeeps and two canvas-covered military transport trucks occupied the street, and dozens of armed soldiers charged into the building.

  For a moment he wondered what would happen if he leapt out into space, aiming for the canvas, like they did in the movies. He decided he would break his neck.

  A cacophony of raised voices and thunderous footsteps filled the stairway behind him. Then he heard the deafening sound of a fire horn.

  Maria raced toward the intersection where she and Jake had parted ways. She had no intention of abandoning him in the heart of Pavot City. Passing Rue de Verger, she glanced down the street and saw Humphrey’s corpse fifty yards ahead of the jeep the soldiers had arrived in. All four soldiers stood in the street, brandishing their guns.

  That isn’t right, she thought. What the hell is going on?

  A car heading toward her stopped at the next intersection, and a pair of Humvees passed her. She stomped on the brake, her pulse racing. When the street cleared, she drove slowly forward and stopped at the corner, where she spied half a dozen military vehicles and a score of soldiers armed with machine guns in front of an abandoned factory. The approaching car passed her, followed by another.

  “Son of a fucking bitch, Jake!”

  She grabbed the Walther and laid it between her legs for easier access. How could she reach Jake?

  Another Humvee drove by and tears obscured her vision.

  Then a fire horn wailed, and in the rearview mirror she saw both of the cars that had passed her come to a sudden stop. An oncoming car across the street stopped as well. The vehicles settled as their drivers killed the engines.

  She winced, torn with indecision. Then she turned the car around and floored it.

  Jake ran through one doorway after another, passing overturned desks, typewriters, and rusted electrical equipment. Seeing no reason to make it easier for them to identify Maria, he took his camera out of his pocket and dropped it down a hole in the wall. He told himself there had to be a stairway at the end of the corridor, where the sunlight flooded through the window space.

  Then he hit a concrete wall. He looked around, but there was only one way out of the deep room, and that was through the corridor, where the soldiers would see him.

  “Sheryl?” he said. “Abel?”

  He didn’t think so.

  “Cain?”

  No shimmering gold light, no lingering stench of sulfur.

  “If anyone cares to intervene, I’d sure appreciate it.”

  No way out. No one to help. He felt like a trapped rat.

  Moving to the doorway, Jake took a deep breath. He estimated he had traveled half the distance to his destination. Hopefully the number of soldiers in the building meant Maria had escaped. He took comfort in that. Good woman.

  Exhaling, he entered the corridor and turned right. He didn’t know how many soldiers had come upstairs or what they were doing. He just ran.

  To his enormous relief, he was much closer to the corridor’s end than he had guessed, and he saw a sun-bleached building across the street.

  Twenty more steps …

  Then he heard a high-pitched whizzing sound, like a bottle rocket being launched in a backyard, and a trail of greenish-brown smoke spiraled over his shoulder. What resembled a compact flashlight struck the dirt floor ahead of him and spun, spewing smoke out of both ends. With no other choice, he charged into the noxious cloud, shielding his eye with one arm and holding his breath.

  Smoke penetrated his eyelid and nostrils, and fire scorched his lungs and brain. Staggering forward, he slammed into the cinder-block wall framing the missing window. He sucked in fresh air, which did no good. The window space sucked the smoke outside, enveloping him. His eye and throat burned and he coughed, which only forced him to breathe in more gas. Bracing his hands on the concrete sill, he considered jumping, but instead he turned to face his attackers.

  Through the gas he discerned a dozen camouflage men standing forty feet away. Wearing black gas masks and clutching automatic weapons, they stood motionless, as if waiting for Jake to drop. But he lurched forward, still coughing, hot tears streaming down his face.

  One soldier stepped forward with his machine gun raised. As he neared Jake, he lowered his weapon, gripping it in both gloved hands.

  Jake raised his hands. Maybe they would take him prisoner if he submitted.

  The soldier stopped, planted his boots apart like a batter over home plate, and held his black weapon ready to fire.

  Jake realized he was doomed. He thought of Edgar, whom he had failed, trapped forever in the body of a raven; of Martin, waiting for him to bring his father home; and he pictured Maria’s face.

  The soldier squeezed the trigger, and the ensuing muzzle flashes lit up the smoke.

  Jake took the charges full in the chest. It felt like a dozen men punching him. Falling back, he felt still more impacts as he slammed onto the dirt floor and gasped for breath, his chest on fire.

  As Maria rocketed past Rue de Verger, she heard machine gun fire coming from the four soldiers who had killed Humphrey. She wove between cars that had stopped in the street, as commanded by the fire horn. She pushed the Dodge as fast as it would go, slowing only to make a left turn, then another. Glimpsing the tall black tower, she vowed that if she survived and Jake did not, there would be hell to pay.

  Civilians turned their heads as she passed them. Their stunned expressions told her no one disobeyed the fire horn. Then she heard the police siren behind her. Looking in the rearview mirror, she saw a single brown car pursuing her. Tilting her head forward, she flexed her fingers on the steering wheel, then tightened them.

  Let’s dance.

  Maria shifted into the oncoming lane, then into the proper lane, a police car following her lead. She repeated the move, and the car remained on her tail. Waiting until she saw a motionless car facing her, she switched back into the oncoming lane. The police car did the same, and she remained in the lane until the last possible second, then returned to the correct lane. Guessing the policeman must have registered the vehicle dead ahead, Maria eased up on the gas and dropped back, riding side by side with the police car.

  With no time to brake to avoid colliding with the stopped car, the policeman jerked his steering wheel to the left, driving into the curb between two parked cars, the impact lifting the police car’s back end into the air. The police car slammed down onto the street and rocked back and forth.

  Gritting her teeth, Maria raced out of the city and boarded the highway ramp.

  THIRTEEN

  Lying on his back, Jake focused on the ceiling. Peeling paint gave way to corroded steel and electrical wires dangling from holes. Tear gas swirled above him and he convulsed.

  Only when the soldier who h
ad killed him looked down at him through his gas mask did Jake realize he felt more pain from the gas than from the wounds in his chest. He knew bullet wounds caused victims to go into shock, and the pain would be unbearable in a few minutes. Was this how Dread and Baldy had felt, bleeding to death on the floor of Kearny’s Tavern after Jake had plugged them in self-defense?

  The soldier beckoned to his comrades, and two came over. They seized Jake’s arms and hauled him up, then dragged him toward the stairway with his feet trailing him.

  Jake looked down at his chest and saw no blood or bullet holes.

  Impossible!

  The soldiers at the top of the stairs jerked their heads forward and back, their gas masks emitting strange, muffled sounds.

  Laughter.

  His confusion amused them. Then it occurred to him: the lead soldier had fired rubber bullets designed for riot control. As they supported him on the way down the stairs, his cloudy mind raced. It was so hard to think with the tear gas burning the passages in his skull.

  The man and woman who had sat behind him and Maria at Coucher du Soleil had been planted there by Humphrey to let him know when they had arrived. The soldiers had killed them and Humphrey with live ammunition and used it to intimidate Maria and him. But they had used rubber bullets to take him down, which meant their orders were to capture him alive. Maria might still be alive as well! Unless she had issued her own death sentence by firing the Walther at them, in which case he was indirectly responsible for her death.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the soldiers threw him to the floor. Glass and gravel bit into his palms. Away from the gas, his lungs and mind cleared. The soldiers peeled off their gas masks.

  “Get on your feet!” The soldier who had shot him drew a .45 from his holster.

  Jake got up. “There was a woman with me—”

  The lead soldier nodded to another, who swung the butt of his machine gun at Jake’s head, knocking him to the floor.

  Seeing red flashes, Jake checked to make sure his glass eye had not fallen out of its socket.