"Oh, it’s disgusting, but it pays the bills. It’s tough to get funding for projects in our field – the perceived value thing, you know – so you take money where you find it and do the best you can. He’s got a grant from – don’t laugh – Living Dead Productions. LDP is a consortium put together by a guy called Roberto Davis-Fennimore. Have you ever heard of him?"
Dani shook her head.
"He does these reality television shows. Pure sensationalism, but he has a knack for it. Anyway, he’s planning to do one called ‘Zombie Next Door,’ or something like that. A weekly television series, some kind of theme resort, the whole thing. He plans to cash in on the zombie craze, and he’ll probably succeed. He’s got a track record of doing this kind of thing. Rumors have surfaced over the years about real-life zombies down here in the islands, you know. There was a rash of reports in the 1980s coming from Haiti, and now RDF – that’s what he calls himself, a play on the opposite of FDR, which he thinks is funny – has heard that there’s something fishy going on in Martinique."
"So I’m sailing you two to Martinique to look for zombies?"
"Yep," Lilly said, a conspiratorial smile on her face.
"How can there be real-life zombies?" Dani asked.
"Well, Voodoo isn’t just one religion. It’s a whole collection, and there are some branches that embody black magic in the rituals. One is called Petro, or Don Pedro, and the priests are called bokors. They’re more like witch doctors, and they created zombies. Aside from a lot of ritual, they drugged their victims. There was a famous case in the 1980s. A Haitian man named Clairvius Narcisse showed up claiming to have been a zombie for 20-odd years. He had been pronounced dead in 1962 at Albert Schweitzer Hospital in the town of Deschapelles, Haiti, after having been attended for a period of time by several doctors, at least one trained in the U.S. Scared hell out of his family when he resurfaced after all that time."
"That’s spooky," Dani said. "Are there other cases?"
"Yes. That one is probably the best known and most studied, but there are others."
"So do the people recover?" Dani asked.
"There’s not a lot known about it. Apparently some recover more fully than others. Narcisse was one who did. The drugs are neurotoxins; aside from possible damage to the nervous system, there has to be a pretty serious psychological impact. Besides, they aren’t usually well-treated while they’re in the semiconscious state, so I wouldn’t think a full recovery happens often."
"Why would anyone do such a thing?" Dani asked.
"You mean now?"
Dani nodded.
"Well," Lilly answered, "first off, you shouldn’t think of this as specific to Voodoo. Voodoo is a benign religion; this is a malignant offshoot. It’s like a black magic subculture that exists among some of the same people who practice Voodoo, but otherwise it’s not related."
"Like the Inquisition and the Roman Catholics?" Dani asked.
"Not quite. That happened under the banner of Catholicism, unfortunately, but it isn’t a totally erroneous comparison. The mainstream Voodoo practitioners have never condoned the more extreme offshoots. Zombies were created to make people slaves of the bokor, for all kinds of reasons. Some of the black magic rituals included human sacrifice, and the potential victims were valuable property of the slave owners. A bokor could make a potential victim appear to die, and then resurrect him to use for sacrifice, and the master was none the wiser. There has also been speculation that after slavery ended in Haiti with the slave rebellion, some of the people used this as a way to enslave others. Most of the people who ‘came back’ from being zombies had been made to work at various things while they were drugged," Lilly said.
Chapter 3
Martinez was listening to what he referred to as ‘Radio Free Redneck’ as he sat in the bumper-to-bumper traffic. He was headed out into the Everglades, where he planned to drive around for a few hours. He wanted to get a sense of the area before he started looking for a suitable location for his training camp.
Listening to Senator Rufus O’Rourke’s cracker-accented diatribe coming from the premium sound system in his Lexus strengthened his resolve to disrupt the man’s presidential campaign. Surely, O’Rourke was a dark-horse candidate, but he was rising in the polls every day with his Bible-thumping, "Amer’ca for red-blooded, Christian, God-fearin’ Amer’cans" rhetoric.
"The firs’ thang, by God, the onliest thang the Fed’ral Gummint got any bidness doin’ is to perteck our borders, an’ they cain’t even do that. We bein’ overrun ever’ day by them forran people what cain’t speak, I mean to tell ya, they don’t even want ta learn ta speak, good ol’ Amer’can English. You know what I’m sayin’. You know who I mean, too. All you gotta do is look at ‘em to know they ain’t like us. And them socialists that we done let get they hands on our gummint in Washington is bent on he’ppin’ mo’ of ‘em come here ever’ day, payin’ ‘em to breed, lettin’ ‘em vote. It’s high time we, I mean all us real Amer’cans, rise up an’ stop this foolishness…"
Martinez turned the radio off. He would be doing this country a favor by taking O’Rourke out of the game. This was ironic, he realized; Martinez considered himself to be apolitical. He was the ultimate mercenary, serving only his own interests, although Chavez and his henchmen had no idea that he was anything but a loyal agent of their policy.
Without the distraction of O’Rourke, he turned his thoughts to his current project. The Ambassador had wanted to give it the code name ‘Walking Dead,’ after the popular show on cable television, but Martinez had persuaded him not to do that. Referring to the front-line participants as ‘zombies,’ even among themselves, would make light of what they were trying to accomplish.
The American people weren’t fools, even if they did occasionally succumb to the temptation of an O’Rourke. Most of them wouldn’t believe that zombies were blowing up buildings and killing elected officials. In his own mind, Martinez had adopted the term ‘operatives’ to describe his drugged, mindless agents. With the right publicity, people could be made to believe that hungry, homeless, out-of-work street-people were rioting, demanding their piece of the American dream. Properly interpreted, such a movement could serve to keep the current liberal administration in power, which was what he had been employed to do. One of his minions had proven herself adept at using social networking to spread just the sort of propaganda that would take root in America’s mindless mass media. She was a genius at manipulating the talking heads who turned mundane current events into the sensationalism that kept television audiences ‘informed." It was through some of her social networking that she had found Jerry Smith, who had actually led Martinez to the houngan.
Martinez had a talent for organization, and had fate set him on a different course, he would have been successful in constructive endeavors. As it was, he was satisfied to be a well-paid, anonymous provocateur; he was excited at the prospect of destabilizing the government of the mighty United States. He focused his attention on the obstacles to achieving his goal.
His strategy was simple and straightforward, but he had some critical tactical problems to resolve. First, he needed to bring in a few trusted lieutenants to recruit and control the operatives. He would select these people from his already-established cadre of agents, all of whom were living in Florida and were in deep cover. They were all native-born American citizens with first generation Venezuelan parents and most had extended family still living in Venezuela. He decided to exclude any who didn’t have close relatives in Venezuela. That would give him one more bit of leverage to ensure their compliance with his plan.
His second tactical requirement was for a concealed base of operations that would be close to a major airport, hence his present excursion into the Everglades. Airport access was necessary for him and his lieutenants, even though he envisioned using vans for most of the actual operations. The base would serve to house those members of his cadre who were involved in recruiting and processing the operatives, as well as serving
as a supply depot and a place to keep the operatives themselves until they were deployed on their missions. It was convenient that his first target, Senator O’Rourke, lived in south Florida. His future targets wouldn’t be as easy to reach from a geographic perspective, but the excellent interstate highway system meant that he could have a team from the Everglades in any of the major metropolitan centers in the eastern U. S. within 24 hours.
He needed a fleet of vehicles that were nondescript, reliable, and could carry three or four people with their luggage and their equipment. He was leaning toward vans that could be equipped with signage for a company that provided contract construction services for public utilities. He had originally thought to disguise the vans as vehicles belonging to the utility companies in his target cities, but quickly realized that would attract attention if the vehicle ventured outside the appropriate metropolitan area. The solution had presented itself when he had moved into a new apartment and ordered high-speed Internet service. The installer had shown up in a generic white van with signage for Jackson & Wirth Engineering.
Martinez had queried the young female installer as she worked, plying her with coffee and sweet rolls. He learned that her employer handled all sorts of contract installation and maintenance for a number of public utility companies all over the country. She lived on the road, rarely spending more than a few weeks in one place before being dispatched elsewhere, and she travelled in the company van. He reasoned that painting a similar company name and some descriptive advertising on the side of late model white vans would provide the ideal camouflage. Such vehicles would be a common sight at the kinds of events and venues that he planned to target.
Martinez had initially thought that he could pay the houngan to create as many of the zombies as he needed. After his visit to Martinique, he saw that securing the houngan’s participation would be more complicated. There was the issue of the victims. Even with his brief exposure to the houngan and his people, Martinez recognized that there was a bond of mutual affection holding them together. The houngan would not be willing to perform his ritual on one of his flock, Martinez thought. The creature that he had shown to Martinez was a stranger, an outsider. This, together with the problem of how to get the creatures past immigration into the U. S., had compelled Martinez to come up with the plan for using street people. Now he must find a way to persuade the houngan to come to the U. S. and work his ‘magic.’ He needed to know more about the houngan to find his vulnerabilities; only then would he be able to manipulate the man.
Martinez had originally thought that he could send a few men to Martinique to pick up a shipment of operatives and escort them back into the country. That was before he had realized how truly mindless the houngan’s victims were. Now he saw that as a major hurdle. There was no way one of the creatures could get past an immigration officer without attracting attention. He had considered bringing them in illegally, which could certainly be done, but it would be risky. When he finally came up with the idea of taking street people and drugging them, he realized how much better that could be.
Many of the street people were military veterans, he knew, suffering from a variety of physical and mental disabilities. Using such a person as a human bomb offered perfect fodder for the public relations effort that Martinez envisioned. After one of these operatives destroyed himself and wreaked havoc on all around him, Martinez could exploit the operative’s background to make him an object of pity rather than scorn, to illustrate that the government needed to be more liberal in helping America’s own underclass. He could readily come up with a story as to why one of these people would want to kill O’Rourke, for example.
****
The houngan studied the woman who sat across the table from him. She had once been beautiful, he thought. Not beautiful in the way the women in the white men’s magazines were beautiful, but beautiful in a spiritual sense. He could see that, but only by looking deeply into her eyes and knowing the miserable series of disappointments that had brought her to this point. He felt a wave of empathy for her; the misery that passed for her life was the story of the Haitian diaspora. "And she’s one of the lucky ones," he thought.
The lucky ones were the ones who had somehow escaped Haiti. Here in Martinique there was work to be done. Hard work, and not well paid, but still enough to buy food. The children didn’t starve, most of the time. There was a dry place to sleep, most of the time. But they were not welcome here. They were tolerated, because they would work diligently at tasks that the local people didn’t want to do: the menial, the dirty, the dangerous jobs that nevertheless must be done by someone.
Martinique had its own poor, though they were far better off than the illegal Haitians. They got a subsistence allowance from the government, so that they could afford to turn up their noses at the jobs that the Haitians were glad to get. They had access to medical care, and their children went to school.
Still, they resented the Haitians. The houngan understood the source of the resentment, and he knew that it was inevitable. As a houngan, he was the spiritual leader of this small enclave of displaced people, and he had seen human nature at its least attractive. Lacking any other leader, his people looked to him for guidance in all problems, temporal and spiritual.
"So, your husband, is he able to rest now, with the potion for pain?" he asked the woman. She nodded uncertainly.
"What else can I do for you, then?" he asked. "He will recover from the beating in time. We will help until he is able to work again. You must not worry."
She nodded again. "I haven’t any money, and only a few chickens…"
Guessing at what was troubling her, he said, "Don’t worry. We must all help each other. When your husband is well and able to work, then we will think of how you can repay the community. Is that all that is vexing you?"
She shook her head this time. "A fétiche," she said softly. "I was hoping…"
"You wish a fétiche to help him heal?"
She shook her head. "To keep us safe from those who did this. For our home," she said, a pleading look in her haunted eyes.
The houngan nodded. "Come tomorrow evening after work, Marie. I will make the fétiche. Now you must go and care for those beautiful children of yours."
After she left, he busied himself at the stove for a few minutes, heating a pan of peas and rice.
"Come," he said loudly to the empty room as he scooped the food out onto two chipped plates.
The dazed, bedraggled white man came through a curtained doorway from the back of the little shack. He shuffled to a stop near the houngan and stood.
"Sit," the houngan ordered, putting a plate in front of the man as the creature settled himself awkwardly at the table. He took his own plate and sat down across the table from the white man.
"Eat," he said. The white man began feeding himself clumsily, using his fingers to pick up the greasy rice.
The houngan shook his head, wishing he had known some other way to deal with this problem, thinking back to the time before he had done this thing. He began to eat slowly, remembering. When the man had been brought to him, he was delirious. The people of the bateye had all helped to nurse the man back to health, but as he recovered, the man became insanely violent, his temper flaring unpredictably. They had tried to expel the man from the bateye, their own little ghetto in the hills south of Fort-de-France, but he kept returning like a stray dog, a rabid stray dog, the houngan remembered.
With no recourse to the authorities and no other way to control the man, the houngan had reluctantly fallen back on his training in the Don Pedro, the dark, violent version of Voodoo. Don Pedro, named for its first proponent, had emerged as black magic to support the rebellion of the slaves in Haiti in the late 18th century, taking its name from an escaped African slave who came to Haiti from Jamaica. It was a subculture within the Voodoo faith that was responsible for most of the negative and frightening images associated with the religion. He had discovered not long after his initiation into that dark priesthood tha
t he was by nature more suited to the constructive elements of Voodoo, and he had ceased practicing the darker ceremonies. In this situation, though, he had been compelled to go against his conscience for the good of his people. He had reluctantly mixed the potion and administered it to the man with a minimum of fuss, reasoning that it would be better for everyone to keep the man alive but subdued. He could be of some use to the community, and he wouldn’t bring harm to himself or any of the houngan’s flock.
Inevitably, word of the zombie had spread, just as the houngan had feared it would. Finally, Marie, the woman whose husband had been beaten by the police, had come to him. She worked as a maid at a resort near Marin, and she reported that a guest at the hotel, a Venezuelan, was asking questions about Voodoo and zombies. Specifically, he had heard rumors that a zombie was being kept somewhere in the hills near the hotel. The houngan wasn’t surprised, but he was worried.
The houngan had reasoned that once rumors of a zombie began to circulate, there would be two types of reactions. The authorities, being educated in the sciences and oriented in a secular direction, would discount the rumors as mere superstition among ignorant Haitians. People who believed otherwise would be too frightened to do anything. That had been the case for as long as anyone could remember, even going back to the era of slavery and beyond.
He had reluctantly agreed to meet the inquisitive visitor. After discovering that the man was respectful and that he was not a journalist or an academic, the houngan had relaxed somewhat. The man had explained that he was studying the efficacy of bush medicine in its various forms, looking to isolate substances that might have medicinal value. He had offered a sum of money in exchange for information that was large enough to tempt the houngan without being large enough to make him suspicious. He weighed the good that the money could do for his people against the potential harm and decided to show the man his patient, as he preferred to think of his charge.
Bluewater Vengeance: Mystery and Adventure in the Caribbean (Bluewater Thrillers Book 2) Page 24