Macumba Killer

by Lou Cameron

  The mystery woman leaned forward, planted a pair of heroic breasts against his chest, bounced faster while she explained, “I’m doing this to save my daughter.” As she kissed him, Captain Gringo knew who she was. Nobody else had teeth as big as the horse-faced Mrs. Gage, Alice’s mother!

  He laughed with his lips pressed to hers, and her tongue tried to swab his tonsils. It was too crazy to be happening. The old dame was ugly as sin with her clothes on. But apparently screwing like a mink ran in the family and, ugly or not, the horsey old dame was good. So he rolled her over and did it right. She had a big ass that didn’t require a pillow under it to meet him at a fantastic angle, and she had amazing muscular control between her thighs. He’d gotten enough rest before she crawled in with him to keep going, and he had to keep going quite a while, thanks to her daughter and Mab’s earlier hospitality. So Mrs. Gage beat him there, twice. The first climax seemed to surprise her. The second, as he went on pounding, seemed to drive her out of her mind. They popped a bedspring and wound up halfway on the floor before he had managed to satisfy himself.

  As he helped her back on the mattress Alice’s mother sighed, “Heavens, I didn’t expect that. It was wonderful.”

  He left it in to soak, and kissed her again before he said, “Life’s full of surprises. Didn’t you expect to like it, uh, ma’am?”

  She moved her hips teasingly and said, “Under the circumstances you can call me Cynthia, Dickie-bird. I’m so glad we got together like this before you made the usual play for my daughter. You are going to leave her alone like a good boy, aren’t you?”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying you seduced me to keep me from flirting with your daughter, for God’s sake?”

  “Not for God’s sake, for the sake of her marriage. Alice has been a bit of a problem to us, you see. We thought marriage would settle her down, but for some reason she just won’t behave.”

  “It must be hereditary. How long has she been such a cross for you to bear?”

  “Oh dear, I caught her with the gardener in the potting shed when she was eleven. She may indeed have gotten her warm nature from my side of the family, but /, at least, have always been sensible about my passions.”

  “You call this sensible?”

  “Of course. It’s not as if I’m mucking about with the servants!”

  “Thank you, I think. I’m getting the picture, weird as it is. You came in here to screw me silly so that I wouldn’t make a pass at your daughter, right?”

  Mrs. Gage wrapped her legs around his waist, tightened alarmingly, and began sliding up and down on his semi-erection while she said, “Of course. I always try to nip it in the bud. I saw the way she was looking at you this afternoon at tea. I thought it was a mother’s duty to, well, make myself available.”

  He found himself responding. The grotesque situation was piquant, and she was so ugly she was exotic. As their passions rose once more she said huskily, “Will you promise to come to mother when you get these urges, Dickie-bird? I know my daughter is attractive and that you young men have needs, but—”

  “Shut up and just do it, mamma,” he growled, not wanting to lie, even to an ugly lady. His mock brutality excited her and she started going wild again. This time they really wrecked the springs and he pulled her off to keep from crashing through to the floor. He got her against the wall and they finished standing as she gasped, “Oh, the wall’s so rough and you’re so rough and I never want to stop!”

  They had to, eventually He half-carried her to a chair he remembered in a corner, and sat down with her in his naked lap. She kissed him and said, “Damn, it’s almost light outside. I’m going to have to nip back to my room, but we’ll get an earlier start tonight, eh what?”

  He said, “I may be out in the jungle. Uh, how does the colonel feel about your sleepwalking, Cynthia?”

  “Heavens, he never wakes up before ten. As you must have guessed, he’s not a very active man.”

  “I figured your sacrifice was overdo. Do you sacrifice yourself a lot for Alice?”

  “Not as much as I’d like to. That silly Webster made an awful fool of me when he first arrived. I mean, how was I to know he didn’t like girls?”

  Captain Gringo laughed and said, “You mean he’s queer? It must have been an interesting night for both of you if you woke him up the way you did me. How the hell did you get in here, by the way? I thought I’d locked the door.”

  “You did. I have a passkey.”

  She got up and added, “I really must be going. Mind that you ignore my daughter’s invitations. If I know Alice, she’ll attempt to seduce you the first chance she gets.”

  He didn’t answer.

  He was trying too hard not to laugh.

  It wasn’t easy, but Captain Gringo also managed to keep a straight face when he met with Colonel Gage and Captain Burton after breakfast. He had the survey charts spread on the guardhouse table and was using a pencil for a pointer while he said, “I’ve been going over the layout of your holdings. With the sugar fields scattered and spread out like this, surrounded by thick growth, your defenses are impossibly complicated. I could set up secure perimeters around each plantation, but the cost in men and materials would be more than the crops would pay for, and your rail network is impossibly vulnerable. I’m surprised they haven’t torn up your unguarded tracks by now. It’s all one narrow gauge ambush, even if we clear the brush back.”

  Burton said, “We’ve thought about clearing the jungle away, but the labor would be astronomical, Walker.”

  “I’m not finished. I agree with you there. The geology of this rock pile dictates spread-out plantings in scattered soil pockets. The distance between sugar fields dictates long communication lines. It would take more men and time than we have to secure it all. But there’s an easier way.”

  He drew a line across the map and said, “Look. Nuevo Verdugo is shaped something like a flattened-out peanut. Set this narrow waistline about the center of the island? This town and all the civilized stuff is here at the north end. This slightly bigger half is pure jungle, and obviously where the natives hang out when they’re not raising hell.”

  Colonel Gage nodded and said, “Quite so, dear boy. But the whole island is ours, if you’re talking about a frontier.”

  “Let’s not be piggy, Colonel. You can worry about the other half once you secure this half and get some crops to market. My plan is to set up a string of strongholds, each within machine gun range of the other, right across the island where it narrows. If we clear a six hundred yard swatch from coast to coast, with a machine gun nest every three hundred yards, we can forget about guarding the workers and sugar fields. Nobody can get near them.”

  Burton said, “Three hundred yards is the effective range, eh?”

  “Yeah. They’ll shoot further, but I wouldn’t bet on hitting anything. Each machine gun nest will have four guns. They can lay a field of fire covering each other as well as the cleared killing zone.”

  Burton nodded, but the colonel asked, “Why six hundred yards, if the guns only fire three?”

  Captain Gringo sighed and said, “The nests will be in the middle of the strip, Colonel. I don’t know why those so-called zombies haven’t seen it, but the guns set up at tree line are vulnerable to an attack from the rear. Put the crews out in the open, well dug in, and nobody can get near them. I noticed some rolls of glidden wire in the warehouse when I was checking the spare guns and ammo. I figure barbed wire, around each nest and down the center of the strip would just about complete the picture.”

  Gage frowned down at the map and said, “Barbed wire? We never used barbed wire on the Northwest Frontier.”

  “I know. You did it the hard way. The German Army has been experimenting with the idea and the French have been getting good results in North Africa with it. Charging through barbed wire and machine gunfire seems to be rough on one’s hide.”

  Gage sighed and said, “Well, I suppose you younger chaps know what you’re doing. But I don’t kno
w what the world is coming to. War is getting to be just another mucking trade”

  Burton nodded and said, “I read about the French and the Riff raiders in the papers. I hate to admit it, but I never even considered that we had rolls of the stuff on hand. If they ever have that big war everyone keeps talking about, it certainly figures to be a bloody mess.”

  Captain Gringo said, “I know. These days we’ve learned to mass produce everything but human bodies. But let’s hope the new young Kaiser is just kidding.

  Getting back to our own modest war, if I have your agreement, Colonel, I’d like to get started before this wet spell ends.”

  “Wet spell, dear boy?”

  “Rain. Splash-splash sloppy in the cane fields. The guerrillas will hit again as soon as the trade winds dry things enough to burn.”

  Burton said, “I’m not sure they’re that well led, Captain. You just pointed out that they’ve passed up some advantages. They seem to be mere savages who’d be no problem if only they didn’t have that weird trick that has our men so rattled.”

  Captain Gringo said, “I don’t know how they work that zombie shit, either. But I know that whatever they are, they can be stopped if you hit ’em hard enough. I’ve talked to some of the guards who’ve fought them. They do go down and stay there, after they’ve been hit a few times more often than usual. Let me set up a real killing zone and we’ll worry after the sons of bitches walk through that!”

  Burton asked, “What if they can?” Captain Gringo replied, “We pack up, go home, and wait for Mamma Macumba to take over the world.”

  Colonel Gage laughed nervously and said, “Right. A real army of real zombies would be able to do that, wouldn’t it? I mean, dash it all, why settle for a jungle island when one has the secret of life and death?”

  Captain Gringo nodded grimly and said, “Haiti never has been able to take over San Domingo, even though they share the same island. The Spanish in San Domingo don’t claim to raise soldiers from the grave, either. See how silly it all gets in the cold gray light?”

  Burton shrugged and said, “We still have to explain that creature you beheaded, Captain.” But Captain Gringo said, “No, we don’t. Not after he went down and stayed there. We’re supposed to waste time on Mamma Macumba’s parlor magic. I’d rather fence the old bitch off on her own half of the island and let her worry about us!”

  Colonel Gage said, “I like that part. But, dash it all, that still leaves the bloody Caribs in control of more than half the island.”

  “The half nobody’s using at the moment, Colonel. Even the native Christians and Creoles are on our side of the line I’ve drawn. Are you up to a short war story?”

  “If there’s a point to it.”

  “There is. Once upon a time there was a man named Geronimo. An American officer named Miles was sent to do something about that. Geronimo never had a hundred men under him at any given time and Miles had the U.S. Army. He had field pieces and Gatling guns. For a couple of years Geronimo made him look like an asshole. I know because I was there.”

  “Oh yes, we read about this Geronimo chap. He would seem to have been a native general with an instinctive grasp of warfare, right?”

  “Wrong. Geronimo was just mean and knew the country. He made a fool of Miles because Miles went about it all wrong. He’d been a good officer in the Civil War, fighting for real estate, and moving his troops into standard positions. But Geronimo had never been to West Point like most Confederate officers, so he didn’t know how the game was supposed to be played and nothing went right for poor old Miles.”

  “But you chaps did get Geronimo in the end, didn’t you?”

  “Sure. A couple of months after Miles went back east to explain why his assignment was impossible. The officer left in charge had no idea how you fought Indians. More important, he knew he didn’t know. So he called in his junior officers and a smart chief scout named Tom Horn and asked them what he should do. We had Geronimo on his way to Fort Sill in a couple of months.”

  “Ah-ah! Foxy fighting using Apache tactics and all that, eh?”

  “No. We stopped trying to figure out where the sly old bastard was aiming to go next. He had thousands of square miles in which to play tag. We moved troops in to secure the waterholes, the passes, the camp sites, and pasture for his horses. We set up so that it didn’t matter what the Apache plans were. Then we just waited until Geronimo gave up.”

  Burton said, “I thought you guys trapped Geronimo.”

  We did. He was trapped in miles and miles of barren wasteland. It was surrender or slowly die of hunger and thirst. So that was that. The last I heard, Geronimo was selling picture postcards of himself at Fort Sill. He looks silly as hell in a horseless carriage, but they say that one’s selling well.”

  They both chuckled. But then Gage said, “Very well. We secure all the important parts of the island and leave the perishing natives the bush. But eventually we’re going to have to clean them out. And they’ll be able to survive indefinitely down in those southern jungles.”

  “Sure they will, Colonel. But eventually isn’t this month or even this year. I’m not offering a final solution. Just a breathing spell. Once you get your colony on a paying basis there’ll be plenty of time to screw the natives out of the rest of their island.”

  Colonel Gage looked pained and said, “I wish you wouldn’t put things so brutally, dear boy. Her Majesty is not in the habit of screwing people out of things.”

  “I’m sure the folks who used to own India and most of Africa agree with you, Colonel. I wasn’t sent here to choose nice words for raw conquest. I’m a soldier of fortune, not a missionary.”

  “Quite so, and, by the way, have you considered my offer to join Pantropic Limited?”

  Captain Gringo said, “Yeah. I think we’ll stick with Sir Basil and Woodbine Arms. I’ll bail you out and see that the guns you paid for make you and yours all safe and snug. But just consider it part of our services.”

  “Well, if you and your friend prefer working for Sir Basil, that’s your business. But once you secure things for us, who’s to conquer the rest of the bloody island?”

  “That’s your business, Colonel. Gaston and I are professional soldiers, not butchers.”

  “Good God, you’re not taking Mama Macumba’s part, are you?”

  “Nope. I’m not trying to save the passenger pigeon either. I just don’t want to have to watch when the last pigeon and the last free native goes down.”

  Chapter Eight

  Had it been up to him, Captain Gringo would have gotten started that morning. But another steamer came in and Burton had to do something about unloading more equipment. So he went to see how Gaston was feeling.

  Gaston said he felt great and that the nurses had been treating him tres formidable. But he was still a little weak, either from the snake bite or from screwing himself silly, and Mab had insisted on another day in bed. Gaston said he could use some sleep.

  Captain Gringo told him of his plans and the Frenchman agreed they made sense. He said, “I feel so useless, Dick. It seems a shame to take even Hakim’s money for the little I’ve done so far.”

  The American said, “So far you’ve been bitten by a bushmaster on Sir Basil’s time, so the bastard owes you. I’ve got to get going. Where’s Mab? She wasn’t in her room just now.”

  “Ah-ha, I might have known you’d go there first. I feel betrayed. I saw her just a little while ago. She said something about going to meet the ship. Perhaps she expects medical supplies.”

  Captain Gringo shrugged it off. He didn’t want to see any more of Burton or Gage for a while. It had been bad enough holding a conference with the two men right after screwing both their wives. He was afraid he’d bust out laughing, now that he knew Webster was up to even wilder sex. He still choked every time he thought of prissy Webster waking up with old lady Gage clutching his pecker.

  He remembered Dama Luisa had said she’d be expecting him and the meeting offered information as well
as what he hoped would be some harmless flirting with a beautiful woman. It had to be harmless. He was still walking a little funny from the weird night he’d just spent.

  A grave-colored servant let him in and he found Dama Luisa waiting for him at a table by the fountain in her patio. She was completely dressed in brown taffeta and a black lace mantilla. Her old duefia was seated discreetly under a distant archway, fanning herself out of earshot, but obviously keeping an eye on them.

  He sat down with a nod of thanks to the Negro holding the chair for him at Dama Luisa’s table. He went away but Dama Luisa said, “I’ve ordered coffee and pastries, Captain Walker. I hope you don’t prefer tea. I really detest it, but it’s all they serve at Mrs. Gage’s interminable afternoon affairs.”

  He said, “I like coffee fine, and I know what you mean. I was there yesterday.”

  “Oh dear, that means I probably won’t meet you there this afternoon. It’s my day for tiffin, I fear. She’s a dear old thing, but a bit stuffy, don’t you agree?”

  He grinned like an idiot and said, trying not to laugh, “I guess she looks like that to most people. But aside from that, how do you and your Hispanic friends feel about being a British colony, Dama Luisa?”

  “Please call me Luisa, Dick. I’m not touchy about being a Creole, either. Spain really messed things up when they had their chance at an empire. We Creoles were only too happy to see these parts taken over by the British. The Spanish always looked down on us so.”

  He knew that as she meant the term, “Creole” meant anyone born on this side of the water, even obvious pure whites like Luisa and her proud family. But he said, “You do have a nationalist group on the island though. Is it safe to assume none of them are Blancas, like yourself?”

  She laughed, and as the Negro returned to place a tray of coffee and pastry between them, she didn’t wait until he was out of earshot before she said, with no hint of defensiveness, “I’m part Indian and, for all I know, part African. We were not always rich landholders. My late husband was an obvious mestizo. Does this bother you?”