Catacombs

by John Farris

  There was a water bottle under one seat; he drank less than he wanted and put it back. He had never flown a Cayuse, but all helicopter cockpits are alike: A copter is flown by means of a cyclic control stick, rudder pedals, and a collective pitch lever at the pilot's right hand. The radio was squawking; he ignored it and turned the engine over, scanned the gauges. The gas tank was nearly full–they hadn't come far: about thirty miles. They had come in from the shore of the lake. The only thing he didn't know was whether they had traveled north or south to get to Kungwe.

  Lem took off and at two hundred feet went straight out over open water, the flaring lake surface. He grabbed for sunglasses in a case on the instrument panel. To his right he saw a crowded lake steamer abeam the Makari headland. He fine tuned the high-frequency direction finder and locked onto a strong signal almost immediately.

  Now at least he knew where he was going: south, along the shoreline. It was all he knew, except for one thing: The chances of finding his friends alive were almost nil. The curious buzzing sensation he got at the top of his spine, around the occipital bulge, when Matt Jade was desperate and trying to home in on him, had faded early that morning.

  But he had a machine gun, he had an armed grenade launcher, and it could be some consolation, if he located the base from which the airborne raid on Kungwe camp had been launched, to complete an exchange of surprises and tear the bastards up.

  The sound of a key in the padlock; the metal bar on the outside of the door sliding back.

  The sudden burning blast of blue daylight as the door opened almost made Raun sick to her stomach. She turned her face away, eyes tightly shut. Hard-heeled shoes or boots on the concrete; someone stood over them both for nearly a minute. She smelled his high-powered shaving lotion. She opened her eyes as much as she could and saw him leaning over Jade, thumbing back an eyelid. He was a Muslim mercenary in the Tanzanian Air Wing. He had the rank of colonel. He wore a short-sleeved blouse, walking shorts, knee socks, a spotless lime-green turban.

  He turned his head slightly and their eyes met. His were like polished brown stones. The whites of his eyes were very white, and there was a rim of sclera beneath the dark irises and darker pupils. His face slanted down to a Van Dyke beard. He looked like the high priest in a grade-Z movie about mummies.

  "Heh deh," Raun said, and tried to lick her swollen lips, the cracks of which were filled with dried blood like nail polish.

  The colonel didn't reply. He put two fingers where the carotid pulse should be in Jade's throat, just below the jaw-line. He did not feel a pulse, and straightened up again. Still he didn't seem convinced. He took out a clasp knife and opened it, squatted beside the body. With the sharp, three-and-a-half-inch blade he made a slashing incision across Jade's chest. The flesh gaped open, but there was no welling of blood. The colonel grunted, put his knife away,. and didn't look at Jade again.

  He had a key ring with him. He found the keys that would unlock the handcuffs, and with them he separated Raun Hardie and Matthew Jade. She felt a small jolt of terror, of unbearable grief. She had buried Andrew Harkness herself, taking two days to dig the grave, sewing him snugly with an awl into an orange-striped awning. Saying her long good-byes in solitude, gaining strength from the self-imposed chores. Now she could only crouch by her man, reduced to the margins of an animal in a cage, helpless and condemned.

  The colonel's every move seemed slow and ceremonial to her, freighted with significance. He removed the steel bands from around her wrists. Her hands looked as if someone had forced gloves onto blood-filled balloons. Raun's eyes bulged from the pain. She screamed, or tried to scream, but nothing came out except a high-pitched wheeze.

  Four black soldiers were waiting in front of the corrugated metal shed. The colonel stepped outside and spoke to them. Two of the soldiers came in, took hold of Jade's ankles and dragged him out. The body was stiffening, his neck was inflexible. They just left him on the bare ground, naked, faceup in the searing sun.

  It was Raun's turn. She tried to get up, to emerge with a show of dignity, but her knees wouldn't support her and her face was contorted from the grisly pain in her hands. They pulled her along on her knees, which were already raw from getting up and down on the rough concrete for fifty-six hours. She also had raw places on her hips, thighs, and elbows.

  She was too dazed to take in much of her surroundings. A few low buildings, mountains in the distance, helicopters, landing strip along the water. A military transport truck was backing up to the shed. The truck bed was covered, canvas over metal struts. They picked Jade up again and threw him into the truck, facedown. Two of the soldiers climbed in and reached down for Raun. The colonel rode up front with the driver. The truck started, made a bumping turn.

  They made her crouch on the floor between parallel benches. Two of them sat behind her, two in front. They had rifles with them. They were young soldiers. When she looked up at one of them while the truck jounced along a washboard road and caught him staring at her, his eyes jumped away. They were all nervous, but excited too. Raun was an event in their lives. They knew that she knew she was about to die.

  The ride was a short one, less than a mile. The noise of the bucket dredger operating from a barge on the lake was louder. A cloud of dust hung around the truck. They lifted Raun over the tailgate and dropped her on sandy ground; she twisted an ankle and screamed. Her hands were still engorged, not quite so painful but nearly useless. She looked at the nearby dredger and smelled the heaps of gassy, lake bottom sand and mud it was spilling into mounds onshore.

  The colonel had stepped down from the cab of the truck, where he stood watching Raun with a slightly sour expression. The soldiers had surrounded her but gave her room, eight to ten feet. They had an air of expectancy. They kept glancing at each other, rubbing their balls suggestively, pumping their fists in the air. They all spoke a native dialect Raun couldn't fathom. One of them, a big pleasant-looking kid wearing a beret, was the butt of the others' jokes. He grinned and shook his head and backed away from Raun, and Raun was, perversely irritated. Did she look so terrible that no one wanted to rape her? It was a time-honored tradition, the musky swaggering males with their big guns, the cowering female captive. Not that she was looking forward to it, but rape would help stretch the time, and despite the grossness of assault perhaps it was a more human thing than merely pointing a gun and emptying her brains all over the lot.

  Raun had an astonishing vision of Matthew Jade standing before her, fresh as a daisy, wearing a cowboy shirt with real mother-of-pearl buttons, his bulldogger Stetson camped down over his shady eyes.

  "Ya-hooo!" he went.

  She was more irritated than ever.

  "Fuck you. I'm the one's in trouble here."

  He winked, the bastard.

  "Fly up their noses, Raunie."

  What? she thought, but then his face dissolved in the dust haze. Just a tantalizing mirage, but she remembered then what he had told her during the middle of their first night together about scratching around and trying to stay alive when Superman was out to lunch and God wasn't returning your calls.

  Raun sat on the ground and began to laugh. She raised her head, looked at each of her captors in turn. She brayed like a donkey, snorted like a pig. She picked up handfuls of dust and sand and flung them into the air above her head. She rolled on the ground and came up well powdered and panting, with her dried tongue protruding between her teeth in a parody of lasciviousness.

  She lunged at the tall boy in the beret and tugged at his trousers, mashing her face into his crotch. He pushed her away hastily, then slapped at her. His fingers stung her forehead but she kept boring in, backing him toward the dredger and away from the truck. The other soldiers were convulsed. Raun growled, reared up on her knees, waggled her breasts at her chosen victim. In her desperate playacting the distinction between the real and the mad blurred; she felt as if she were detached from her body, standing aside as coolly as the colonel and watching her crazed antics. But there was no
way she or anyone could hope to stop it now, not until the order was given and their bullets smashed into her.

  Unfortunately the colonel had a low threshold of boredom. He walked toward Raun and the soldiers and cracked out a command.

  The spell was partly broken, but Raun wouldn't give up. One of the soldiers had to kick her hard in the stomach to knock the breath out of her and quiet her down. She lay on her side clutching her stomach, rolled onto her back.

  The colonel repeated his order to shoot her. The soldiers reluctantly clicked off the safeties of their weapons, and moved side by side into the truck's parabolic shadow.

  The tall boy dried his sopping brow on the sleeve of his shirt. Each of the soldiers waited for the others to commence firing. One of them heard a helicopter and glanced up to see where it was coming from. The colonel heard it too, and was momentarily distracted. Raun's left foot slid a couple of inches in the dirt and was still.

  Flies buzzed inside the truck and crawled on Matthew Jade. In the few minutes the soldiers had been occupied with Raun there had been some changes.

  First his respiration, huiksi, which had been down to a shallow, undetectable four breaths a minute, began to increase. His heartbeat also picked up slowly, and the induced, severe depression of the autonomic nervous system was reversed. A thin red line of blood appeared within the gash on his chest; a couple of drops fell to the floorboards of the truck before he shut off the flow with his mind. His eyes opened; the pupils equalized. His skin, which had been very cold to the touch, now warmed. His fingers moved first, curling lightly into the palms. Then his feet, his shoulders; his head lifted a fraction as he recovered from the state of tonic immobility he had willed hours ago. But despite his proficiency, there was no way to hurry the process of awakening the body from the Long Sleep Like the Dead without causing severe and possibly lethal strains on his vital organs. Just as there were no shortcuts along the road to pavásio, the state of deepest concentration from which he could gently sever all connections with the apparent world while remaining in touch by means of his spiritual, third eye–called kataimatoqve in the Hopi language.

  Since achieving pavásio, he had been aware of everything that was happening to him, including the knife slash across his chest, which made no more impression than a pinprick. He had closely followed Raun's efforts to prolong her life and now, having heard the colonel's repeated command to his soldiers to shoot, he felt a stab of regret that he probably wasn't going to make it all the way back in time to save her. Even at a peak of physical efficiency there was no hope he could overwhelm four men with automatic rifles. He was completely naked and had no weapons.

  He did, however, have a voice, and he was just able to stand up now without support as his heartbeat continued to accelerate. He felt a shock of adrenaline which would be useful.

  Rising, turning, Jade willed his facial muscles to sag. His eyes were far back in his head. From deep in his throat came a hideous sucking, moaning noise. He walked stiffly and slowly to the tailgate of the truck and gave them all a good look at him.

  The soldiers were a study in petrifaction. Jade was dead, they had been certain of it. Cold and unbreathing in the harsh sun. His body, when cut open, had not bled. So his appearance now, a raging, moaning, walking corpse, was beyond their ken. He was something out of a fell corner of their bush childhoods. In their minds they made of him a giant, come to gobble them up, tear them limb from limb.

  Jade, noting an itchy trigger finger, an impulse to lift a Kalashnikov and fire wildly at him, concentrated his attention on the potential danger and moaned again like Marley's ghost, pointing a trembling finger that was as effective as a gun. The soldier he singled out dropped his rifle with a sharp cry of terror and trod on his fellows as he tried to get away.

  They were all a split second from total panic, or recovery. The colonel, not so easily fooled, yelled a warning at his men. But his words were drowned by a helicopter flying over the truck, its shadow sweeping in like a dark wave of the sea. There was a momentary whistling sound, followed by a crumpling explosion as one of the mucky sand hills by the dredger blew apart, showering them with debris.

  Raun was sitting up, staring at Jade. His eyes were on the helicopter as it banked left a couple of hundred yards downwind and started back. He motioned sluggishly to Raun.

  "Get under the truck! Hurry!"

  He didn't wait for her response; he dropped over the tailgate of the truck, landed awkwardly, got his balance, and picked up the abandoned rifle. Everyone, including the colonel, was now concentrating on the incoming copter. Two of the soldiers were prone, sighting on it. Jade knelt and in what seemed to him to be slow motion squeezed the trigger of the Kalashnikov in one-second bursts. Plum-sized holes ran up the colonel in a drunken line from his left kneecap to his right eyebrow. Before he fell Jade had already killed the big shy kid with the beret, who had not been properly taught to get his head down when armed helicopters zoomed in at him. Now his head was on the ground and several feet away from the rest of him. The unarmed soldier was off and running. Jade saw a quick burst from the pod of the inboard machine gun on the copter; heavy fifty-caliber slugs swatted the runner like a fly.

  Raun came humping and crawling on her bloody dark elbows and bad knees and burrowed past him with a sob, huddled beneath the rear axle of the truck. Jade fell back a little himself.

  In the helicopter Lem Meztizo answered ground fire from the two remaining soldiers with another burst from his machine gun. He missed, but as the copter swept by overhead, one of the soldiers lost his nerve and struck for cover. Jade dropped him, then sprayed the heels and soles of the other one until he let go of his rifle and rolled over screaming in pain.

  "You're alive? You're alive?"

  "Didn't you ever play dead when you were a kid?" Jade said to Raun. "I was just better at it than most. Stay here."

  He crawled out from under the truck, holding the rifle in two hands across his chest. The helicopter, in Tanzania's colors, was turning before the sun, which was now halfway to the horizon over the lake. But he didn't know who was flying the copter; he'd had only a glimpse of a swarthy tense face, sunglasses, a fatigue cap pulled down tight. Gibby might have had a backup team handy, in case something went sour, but he doubted it. The helicopter stormed in again and he ducked his head to avoid the blast of grit stirred up by the rotor blades.

  Lem got out grinning, and although most of his clothes and hair were missing, there was no mistaking his general contours, the twenty-four carat artistry in his mouth.

  Jade threw his hands into the air in an ecstatic, silent gesture of celebration and welcome. Lem couldn't resist swaggering a little.

  "Where'd you get the helicopter, stud?" Jade yelled at him. Lem had left the engine on.

  "Took it off a couple of guys."

  Raun let out a shriek of joy and scrambled from beneath the truck. The three of them merged, like aborigines, in a communal embrace.

  The dredger had stopped running after the rocket-powered grenade exploded near it. The soldier Jade had shot in the feet was still writhing on the ground in pain; he was no problem for them. It was quiet there in the Sun; no one had come from the base, which was out of sight behind a low ridge, to see what the grenade was about.

  "Pick up some guns," Jade said, "and lets go. We'll get sorted out while we're still in the air."

  "Where to?" Lem asked.

  "Kilimanjaro."

  They were aloft, approaching the Ugalla River Game Reserve at a thousand feet, the sun like red wine in the sky behind them. Lem was at the controls.

  Raun had found an extra water bottle in the cab of the truck at Chale Point and brought it along. There was a large first-aid kit in the helicopter, a pint of konyagi the pilot had stashed. With the water and the gin as a mild antiseptic, she and Jade had taken sponge baths and attended to each other's wounds.

  He closed the slash across his chest with butterfly bandages and told Raun the wound would heal without a scar. He had been k
nifed before, and shot; there were no signs of such wounds on his hide, and by now she was familiar with every inch of it. He had an almost boyish build and a fair, downy skin. Just a small birthmark at the base of his spine.

  "No scars?"

  Mind over matter, Matthew Jade said.

  "It started a long time ago. I found out I could wish away warts, stop nosebleeds, control pain by concentrating on it. I healed a broken ankle in two weeks, and the sucker was in pieces. I scared hell out of both my parents by going into a deep trance at a Hopi mystery play. John Tovókinpi of the Black Wolf Society recognized that I had a talent, and assigned himself as my guardian and mentor to instruct me in the wisdom of the powáqa–the Hopi sorcerers. I was also nuts about Harry Houdini when I was a kid. I set out to duplicate as many of his feats as I could."

  "You do magic?"

  "There's no magic involved, it's a matter of pavásio and plain hard work. Houdini was a gifted contortionist who could readily change the shape and dimensions of his body."

  "Then why couldn't you get out of those handcuffs?"

  Jade had a swig of the konyagi and passed her the bottle, but the fiery stuff aggravated her already sore throat, and she refused.

  "It would have taken me all of thirty seconds," he said.

  "But you let us suffer like that!"

  "Out of the handcuffs didn't mean out of the box. That was a roughie. I couldn't be sure when or if they were watching us. If I was loose they could have decided just to crack the door a few inches and roll a grenade in. But I knew they wouldn't worry about a dead man."

  "You might have told me what you were up to," she said, sulking.

  Jade put a hand on her shoulder. "Sorry, Raun. I wanted your reaction to be genuine."