Quintana Roo

by Gary Brandner

  He looked up at Buzz and Connie, who were watching from a few feet away.

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry, Hooker,” Buzz said.

  Connie opened her mouth but did not say anything.

  Hooker placed the body of the Mexican girl gently on the river bank. Upstream, the muerateros had seen them and were coming toward them through the brush, heedless of thorns and branches.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Hooker said.

  Buzz, moving clumsily on the wooden foot, stepped aboard the frail raft.

  Hooker gave Connie a shove. She was staring at the advancing muerateros and seemed unable to move. Finally, Hooker picked her up and set her aboard the raft. Buzz took her there and held her. Hooker got on then and cut the rope holding them to the tree. The raft spun out into the river current just as the first of the muerateros reached the ceiba tree.

  The creatures hesitated at the water’s edge. They were of different sizes and skin shades but alike in the emptiness of their faces. Several of them waded out until they were knocked over by the current. They pulled themselves back to shore and began following along on the river bank.

  “Close,” said Buzz. He sat cross-legged, his arms wrapped around Connie. She was on her knees, still staring back at the walking dead men.

  Hooker sat close to them, so all three were huddled in the center of the raft. They picked up speed as the raft was drawn to the swifter current at midstream. Hooker took Connie by the shoulder and shook her, not too gently.

  “Hey. They haven’t got us yet.”

  Connie pulled her eyes away from the bank where the creatures were struggling to keep up with the now swiftly moving raft.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “One of them was Nolan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Speaking slowly and carefully, Connie said, “One of those zombies was my husband, Nolan Braithwaite.”

  “You must be wrong.”

  “I’m not wrong. He stood out from the others because his skin was the whitest. Nolan never could get a decent tan. It was his body, his face, only … only, he was dead.”

  Hooker and Kaplan exchanged a look.

  “It could be true,” Buzz said. “I never knew what they did with him.”

  “Connie, I don’t know what to say.”

  She reached out and touched Hooker’s face, trying a smile. “What the hell, you should be comforting me?”

  There was a jolt as the raft banged into a rock that just broke the surface of the river. One of the end logs was knocked askew.

  “We can comfort each other later,” Hooker said. “Our job now is to stay afloat.”

  He retied the loose log while Buzz used his makeshift crutch to keep the raft off other rocks that jutted out of the water. Connie gripped the back of Kaplan’s belt with both hands to keep him from falling overboard. And always, along the bank, there were the ominous shadows moving among the trees, tracking them.

  “Shit!” Buzz said. “They’re on both sides of us now.”

  Hooker looked across to the opposite bank of the river and saw they had company there, too. But there was a difference.

  “Those are Indians,” Hooker said. “Live ones. With spears.”

  As he said it, one of the Mayas on the far bank let fly with his spear. It wobbled in flight and sliced into the water well upstream of the raft.

  “Let’s hope their aim doesn’t improve,” Buzz said.

  Another Mayan spear dove into the river alongside them. “The footing isn’t solid along the bank,” Hooker said. “They’ll have to be really good to hit a moving target.”

  “Or lucky,” Connie put in.

  “Yeah.”

  • • •

  The river twisted and writhed like a great brown snake through the dark green jungle. For a long stretch, the growth was too thick on shore for them to see if the followers were still there.

  “Maybe they went home,” Connie said.

  Hooker frowned. “Like Alita said, Mayas never give up.”

  They floated along without speaking, almost peacefully for a while. It was Connie who broke the silence.

  “You liked her a lot, didn’t you, Hooker.”

  “A lot,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about what happened.”

  “People die. None of us are out of this yet.”

  “Goddam!” Buzz’s shout brought Connie’s and Hooker’s heads around in time to see Buzz start to slip into the river.

  Hooker lunged across the raft and grabbed him by the collar. The bottom half of Buzz’s body was in the water where something dark and leathery was thrashing the river water into a froth.

  “Cayman!” Buzz shouted. “Son of a bitch came out of the water and grabbed me.”

  “Hang on to him,” Hooker yelled. He snatched up the Mayan sword from where he had wedged it between the logs of the raft. Over and over, he struck at the thing in the water while Connie hugged Buzz from behind to keep him from being pulled away from them.

  The sword bounced off the bony head of the gatorlike cayman with no effect. The vicious teeth dug in deeper. Hooker stopped his useless slashing, gripped the hilt of the sword with both hands, and went for the creature’s eye. The sword point slid into the eyeball and scraped the ridge of bone around the socket. The cayman opened its jaws to bellow, and Connie toppled backward onto the raft with Buzz in her arms.

  The six-foot reptile dove under the water to reappear almost immediately upstream and bellow again. Still holding the sword, Hooker turned to Buzz, who was disentangling himself from Connie.

  “Where’d he get you?”

  Buzz held up his leg. There were fresh, deep gouges in both sides of the wooden foot. “Honest to God, I never thought I’d be glad to be wearing that thing instead of a real foot.”

  Hooker drew a deep breath. “Maybe you shouldn’t dangle it overboard.”

  “I told you the bastard jumped up and bit me.”

  “Okay, but let’s try to stay as close to the middle of the raft as we can.”

  • • •

  The morning wore on, and the river broadened as it was joined by underground streams. They kept a close watch on both banks but saw no more sign of Mayas or muerateros.

  “That doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” Hooker said. “They can be watching us all the way.”

  “Where, exactly, is this river going?” Connie asked. “If that isn’t a dumb question.”

  “It’s got to take us to the Caribbean,” Buzz said. “As near as I can figure, it comes out somewhere in Ascensión Bay.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  “Hell, once we get to the sea, we’re as good as home. There are fishermen up and down the coast all the time.”

  “Any idea how far it is?”

  “The whole territory isn’t sixty miles across here. The river has pretty much straightened out, and we’re floating west at a good clip. I figure we ought to reach open sea well before sundown.”

  “We better,” Hooker said. “There’s no way we can handle this thing in the dark.”

  Hooker took over using Buzz’s crutch to keep the raft away from tangled roots along the bank and rocks out in midstream. They saw no further activity in the brush on either side of the river.

  The sun reached its zenith and started down ahead of them.

  “I wish we’d brought some of those coconuts,” Connie said. “I’m starving.”

  “We really weren’t equipped to carry provisions,” Hooker said.

  Buzz grabbed his arm and pointed ahead of them to a mud flat that extended well out into the stream. “Think you can guide us over there?”

  “Sure. What for?”

  “Food. Come on, paddle.”

  The three of them used their hands, the crutch, the sword, to paddle furiously and bring the raft within a few feet of the mud flat. Hooker jumped out into hip-deep water and dragged the raft behind him to the flat.

  “Now what?” he said. />
  “Look around for a depression in the mud, like a dish, with a kind of mud ridge around it.”

  “They’re all over the place.”

  “Dig your hand down into one of them.”

  “Wait a minute, is something going to bite me?”

  “Trust me,” Buzz said.

  Hooker sighed and thrust his hand down into the greasy black mud in the center of one of the depressions. It was warm from the sun. His fingers touched a firm surface, and he pulled back reflexively. He glanced at Buzz and dug deeper. He got his fingers around something that felt like a Ping-Pong ball. He brought it up carefully and washed off the mud in the running stream.

  “Swell,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Turtle egg,” Buzz said. “There’ll be more down there.”

  “Are we supposed to eat those things?” Connie said.

  “The Indians think they’re delicious.”

  “Raw?”

  “Unless you can think of a way to start a fire on the raft. Give it here.”

  Buzz held out his hand, and Hooker put the turtle egg in it.

  “I think I’d rather starve,” Connie said.

  “You got to give it a chance,” Buzz said. He took up one of the Mayan knives and stabbed a hole in opposite sides of the egg. He put the egg to his mouth, tilted his head back, and noisily sucked out the contents. When he had finished, he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and smacked his lips in an exaggerated way.

  “Man, that is what I call a turtle egg.”

  Connie shuddered.

  There were five more in the nest. Hooker dug them out and brought them aboard the raft. He tried jabbing holes in one of them as Buzz had, but the egg shattered in his hand. He rinsed his hand in the river and tried again. This time, he successfully punctured both sides of the egg and sucked out the contents. It tasted like a raw egg.

  “How is it?” Connie asked.

  “Delicious. Here.”

  She took an egg from him, punched delicate little holes, and sucked. She made a sick face at them but finished off the egg.

  “Have another?” Hooker asked.

  “No, thanks. I don’t seem to be hungry anymore.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Hooker caught a movement in the brush along the river bank upstream of them. He called the others’ attention to it with a nod.

  “I think we’d better be under way.”

  Hooker jumped off and waded out into the river, pushing the raft until he was waist deep; then he pulled himself aboard and looked up at Buzz and Connie. Their faces were white.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I guess you didn’t see what was coming after you,” Buzz said.

  Connie pointed down at the water.

  He looked and saw a black snake with coppery bands swimming away in a series of graceful S’s.

  “Probably harmless,” Hooker said, but his knees suddenly felt watery.

  • • •

  It was late afternoon when they noticed a change in the foliage along the river bank. There were more palms and fewer of the deep jungle trees like chicle and ceiba. Then they heard the sound up ahead, A whisper first, then a sort of rushing, and finally a muffled roar.

  The men looked at each other.

  “You know what that is?” Buzz said.

  “Waterfall.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I think we’d better beach.”

  They steered the raft over to the bank and climbed off. The ground was harder there, making it easier for Buzz to use his crutch. The roar of the waterfall could be clearly heard now, and there was a mist in the air that dampened everything.

  Connie ran on ahead while the men stowed the raft under some branches. They heard her cry out and looked up. She came back smiling and laughing like a child on her birthday.

  “Come and look,” she called. “Come on!”

  Hooker and Buzz followed her up a slope and through a dense stand of palm trees. There they stopped suddenly, unable to speak.

  Immediately before them was a cliff dropping some fifty feet to the rocky beach. Off to their right, the river plunged in a misty cataract. Ahead of them, beyond the beach, lay the sheltered Ascensión Bay and the deep blue Caribbean.

  Buzz Kaplan began to dance — crutch, wooden foot, and all. “We made it!” he yelled above the roar of the waterfall. “We goddam made it!”

  Connie hugged Buzz, then she hugged Hooker, and the three of them talked at once, and nobody listened until Hooker suddenly fell silent, looking off along the beach.

  “There’s something down there.”

  Connie and Buzz quieted and looked.

  “I don’t see anything,” Connie said.

  “Look close.”

  “By God, there is something,” Buzz said. “Buildings. Three, no, four of them. And a dock. There’s even some kind of bridge across the river down there. But everything’s painted to make it hard to see. Camouflage. What the hell?”

  “I’ve got a feeling we better head down the beach in the other direction,” Hooker said.

  “Wait a minute,” Connie said. She leaned forward, squinting against the sun. “There are men moving around down there. Oh, thank God. They’re white men.”

  CHAPTER 32

  “Hey!” Connie shouted, waving both arms high over her head. The sound of the surf on the beach below drowned out her voice. “Hey, down there!”

  Hooker ran forward and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her back from the edge of the bluff.

  “What’s the idea?” she said. “There’s white men down there. They’ll help us.”

  “Don’t be so damned eager,” Hooker said. “Let’s find out who they are.”

  Connie looked at Buzz.

  “He’s right,” Buzz said. “After all we’ve been through, we’d be saps to rush into something now without knowing the score.”

  “Oh, all right,” Connie said. “We’ll tiptoe down the hill and make sure these people are okay before we let them rescue us. Excuse me for being so silly and impetuous. After all, you’re the big strong men who make the decisions. I’m just the poor weak little woman.”

  “I’m glad you’re not bitter,” Hooker said.

  The three of them made their way along the lip of the bluff until they found a trail leading down to the beach and the motley grouping of buildings.

  “What do you think is going on down there?” Buzz wondered.

  “Damned if I know,” Hooker said. “It sure as hell isn’t a resort hotel.”

  “Not with the camouflage and that businesslike dock. It looks kind of military. The Mexican army isn’t doing anything down here, are they?”

  “What Mexican army?” Hooker said.

  “I see what you mean.”

  They reached the foot of the bluff and paused to look toward the beach. The facility was cold and forbidding at ground level. The buildings were of wood and corrugated metal. The walls were painted a drab gray so that they could not be seen from the air. There were neat paths connecting the buildings. The dock extended 100 feet out into the bay. There were big cylindrical tanks at the near end, painted in camouflage patterns of green, brown, and black. A dozen or so men stood out on the seaward end of the dock.

  The sound of voices close up ahead startled the three people at the base of the bluff. They froze in position and looked at each other.

  “They’re talking German!” Buzz said in a hoarse whisper.

  Frowning, Hooker nodded. The three of them crouched low in a clump of palmettos.

  Ten feet in front of them, a four-man work party marched past in single file, keeping in step over the rocky ground. They were dressed in gray coveralls and carried shovels over their shoulders.

  The conversation among the four workmen was animated, and their attention was focused on the activity out on the dock. They passed the spot where Hooker, Buzz, and Connie crouched holding their breath, and continued toward one of the buildings that looked like a bar
racks.

  Hooker jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing back up the hill. When the work party was out of sight, they scrambled back up to where a jutting boulder provided shelter and hid them from below.

  “What the fuck is it all about?” Buzz said.

  “Whatever it is,” said Hooker, “it’s none of our business. Like I said a while back, let’s get across the river and head down the beach the other way until we can pick up a ride with some fishermen.”

  “Look out there,” Connie said suddenly, pointing out into the bay.

  Half a mile off shore, something broke the water.

  “A whale,” Hooker suggested.

  “No, look.”

  A conning tower came into view, then the hull, black and spilling water. At the bow was the distinctive saw-tooth cable cutter.

  “A goddam submarine,” Buzz said.

  “Yeah,” Hooker said. “Let’s make tracks.”

  “This is a goddam submarine base.”

  “Maybe. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait,” said Buzz.

  “Wait? What the hell is there to wait for? The sooner we clear out, the better.”

  Neither Buzz nor Connie moved. They were staring out to sea as the sub headed in under power toward the dock. Hooker sighed and settled down to watch with the others.

  The tempo of activity increased down below. Men hurried back and forth, and carts of equipment were rolled down to the dock. Someone ran a flag up from the conning tower of the submarine. The cheering of the men on shore could be heard all the way back to where Hooker and the others watched. The flag was red, with a black swastika in a white circle.

  “Look at that!” Buzz said. He struggled to his feet, and Hooker had to pull him back down. “It’s a goddam Nazi submarine right here on the coast of Mexico.”

  “Quintana Roo isn’t exactly Mexico,” Hooker said.

  “I give a shit for technicalities,” Buzz said. “Those fucking goose-steppers are moving into my country. We gotta do something about it.”

  “Hold on,” Hooker said. “Slow down. Wait a minute.”

  Buzz finally subsided and looked at him. “Well?”

  “Maybe you will tell me just what you have in mind doing about it.”