Age of Voodoo

by James Lovegrove

  “The alternative being that we wind up as zuvembies. Like Colonel Gonzalez.”

  “Just so,” said Seidelmann. “Do you relish the prospect of that? Because believe me, I do not.”

  Again Seidelmann made for the door, simply assuming that everyone else would take their lead from him and follow. When no one did, he was perplexed.

  “Pearce?” said Buckler. “If Poindexter here tries that one more time, put a bullet in him. You choose where.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Do you not appreciate the gravity of the situation?” Seidelmann said, rounding on Buckler. “François Deslorges is dug in downstairs, and he’s hatching some scheme, I have no idea what, but knowing him it can’t be anything good. He has amassed a small army of zuvembies, and with them at his beck and call there is no way you can get to him and no way you can hinder him. If you value your safety, lieutenant, and that of your troops, you would be wise to depart right now, taking me with you. Go back out the way you came in, and leave Deslorges to his own devices.”

  “No can do, prof. I have my orders.”

  Seidelmann sighed at his obstinacy. “You would rather die?”

  “In an ideal world, no. But this isn’t an ideal world. It’s the world of the US military, where you have two options: do as you’re told, or do as you’re told. I have been told to put a lid on the problem at this installation, so that is my primary objective. And it will be a damn sight easier to achieve if you, sport, pull your head out your fucking ass and supply me with some background detail.”

  “In other words, fill you in on Deslorges and his zuvembies, the whole sorry saga?”

  “That is exactly it. Maybe if I know more about those things, I’ll have a better chance of ending them.”

  Seidelmann’s shoulders slumped. He seemed to realise there was no point in arguing. Buckler had the whip hand. Seidelmann might not like it but there was nothing he could do about it.

  “Very well,” he said. “Give me a drink of water, some more food, and I’ll tell you all I can.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T.

  “IT WAS A good idea,” Professor Seidelmann said. “Correction, a great idea. In this era of asymmetrical warfare, when entire battalions can be undermined by the efforts of a handful of determined guerrillas, when terrorists armed with box cutters can cause widespread devastation and the best-funded military and intelligence service in the world are helpless to prevent it, the concept of a standing army is becoming increasingly redundant. The strategy of sending men and women into pitched battle, to overwhelm enemy positions and gain territory, is antiquated. Outmoded. Something for the history books. What’s called for these days is not huge numbers of troops—cannon fodder—but rather, far fewer of them. Soldiers of the highest calibre who can be deployed in small units in hostile zones to secure high-value targets and deliver surgical counterstrikes—”

  “Please, professor,” Buckler butted in. “This sounds like the beginning of a lovely long speech, and it’s beautifully put and all, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. Cut to the chase.”

  Seidelmann took a swig of water from Buckler’s canteen, a move designed to mask his annoyance at being interrupted mid-flow. “I was merely building up to saying that the way forward, the future for the military, is a harder, more durable, more resilient breed of soldier. One who can take the kind of punishment that would hobble an ordinary man and keep going. One who can last longer behind enemy lines, go without rest longer, fight longer, withstand torture longer, survive longer in harsh, unforgiving conditions...”

  “Sounds to me like you just described a SEAL,” said Tartaglione. “Twenty-six weeks of Basic Underwater Demolition at Coronado—you live through that, you’re not a man any more, you’re a goddamn war machine.”

  Sampson cheered in agreement, and the two of them bumped knuckles. Pearce, for his part, nodded sagely.

  “Acknowledged,” said Seidelmann. “But even a SEAL will succumb to a sniper’s bullet or an improvised explosive device. Even a SEAL is vulnerable to the frailties that flesh is heir to. My goal—my dream—was to discover a method whereby soldiers could be made immune to exhaustion and hardened to injury. My researches in this field led me towards Haiti and the vodou tradition, specifically with relation to the zuvembie. I learned that the zuvembie was more than just folklore, that there was actually a sound empirical basis for the myth of the walking dead man, and that it was to be found in the application of certain pharmacological substances.”

  “This we already know too,” said Buckler. “Tetrodotoxin, datura, all of that.”

  “If you’re so au fait with the subject, lieutenant, is there any need for me to carry on?”

  Buckler decided to strike a conciliatory note. “There is, and I’d be much obliged if you would.”

  “At any rate, I visited Port-au-Prince, and after enquiring around was put in touch with François Deslorges, also known as Papa Couleuvre, a bokor who claimed to be able to create zuvembies. We struck up a working partnership—I shan’t bore you with the details, you’d no doubt consider them extraneous—and with his aid I came to an understanding of what a zuvembie is and by what means it is possible to induce a person to become one. Thereafter it was a case of working out how to apply the process practically and in such a way that it could be of use to my employers at the Pentagon—how to take an ordinary general infantryman and turn him into a fearless, inexhaustible, unstoppable killer commando. Deslorges agreed to continue to assist me here, at Anger Reef, in return for a handsome retainer. He seemed, at the time, to be motivated solely by profit, for which reason I felt I could trust him. There’s nothing purer or more reliable than sheer greed, is there? I knew he was an unsavoury character with a very shady reputation but I believed he would be biddable as long as he was getting paid. His love of money would keep him honest.”

  “A vodouisant should not love money,” said Albertine. “The loa do not approve of acquisitiveness, especially when it’s someone exploiting vodou for their own gain.”

  “Yes, thank you, my dear,” said Seidelmann. “I take it you’re a practitioner of the art yourself? Then you would know as well as I do that there are two sides to vodou. Like any other belief system, it attracts its fair share of charlatans and conmen, fakers and frauds, people who are in it only for what they can get out of it. I was under no illusion about Deslorges. From the start I knew he would require careful handling, a certain amount of finessing. Yet, despite his outré physical appearance and his quite prodigious intake of marijuana, I felt he was sincere, in his way, and committed to his calling. He seemed—is—highly accomplished when it comes to vodou, an advanced kanzo initiate. Take, for instance, his prowess as a thaumaturge. In Port-au-Prince, as a guest at his peristyle, I watched him perform acts of healing that were quite remarkable, one might even say miraculous. He removed a disfiguring birthmark from a baby’s face. He shrank a benign growth on an old woman’s neck until it disappeared altogether. In a country like Haiti, with its already negligible health care system made worse by the recent earthquake, a man like Deslorges is a powerful force for good, or perhaps a necessary evil. A witch doctor who’s as much doctor as witch. He also could be very charming—charismatic—when he wished to be. I decided that, on balance, it would be safe to extend my association with him.”

  “But you were wrong.”

  “Indeed, dear, I was wrong. Very wrong.” Seidelmann looked rueful, the snake wrangler who had been bitten by one of his pets. “For our first few weeks at Anger Reef we collaborated peaceably and proficiently enough, Deslorges and I. He assisted me with gauging dosages and adjusting formulae. We were seeking to develop the perfect mixture of herbs and toxins to achieve the zuvembie effect while still allowing the element of self-determination in the subject. We wanted to be able to bring someone to the point where fatigue and discomfort are minimal, almost immaterial, while not being zombie-like in the conventional sense—retaining their se
ntience and independence of thought. A tricky balance, but the results, in rhesus monkeys, were encouraging. We had animals that could go for days on end without food or water and show no ill effects. Animals that could undergo vivisection procedures happily without anaesthetic, all the while carrying out simple puzzle-solving problems. Animals that could cling to heating filaments with no evident distress even as their paws were slowly scorched...”

  “Nice,” said Morgenstern.

  “Don’t think I don’t have a conscience about these things, young lady. I’m no unfeeling monster. But if science is to advance, some unpleasant steps must be taken. And unless you’ve never worn any cosmetics or shampooed your hair with any products that haven’t been safety-tested on God’s lesser creatures first, don’t be so quick to judge.” Another swig of water. “Eventually we reached the stage where we were ready to graduate to the next level—humans. Through rigorous experimentation on monkeys we had a product we felt was suitable for use on people with few if any side effects. We elected to call it V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. I say ‘we’, but it was Deslorges who came up with the name and then expected me to construct an acronym to suit.”

  “Which you did.”

  Seidelmann allowed himself a small smile of pride. “I did. Venously Injected Vitality Elixir Magnifying Ordinary Resilience Twentyfold. The name V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T., and the fact that Deslorges refused to consider any of the alternatives I suggested, ought to have tipped me off to his ulterior motives. Perhaps if I’d been less bound up in my work, less thrilled by the advances I was making... I was, after all, on the brink of that long-sought-after, much-desired breakthrough: the creation of super-soldiers.”

  “And then, at some point, Deslorges turned you over and butt-fucked you,” said Buckler. “Without lubricant.”

  Seidelmann winced. “With hindsight I should have noticed sooner that he had begun to behave erratically, and should have nipped it in the bud. His timekeeping lapsed. He wasn’t down at the labs punctually every morning, as he had been. He seemed to be losing interest in what we were doing, his enthusiasm waning. Sometimes I had to roust him out of his room or the refectory to come and help me. On occasion I would have to go topside to find him, and there he’d be, on the beach, gazing out to sea or else dancing and chanting, communing with the loa. He complained that being underground all the time was making him claustrophobic. His marijuana usage went up. He seemed to have brought along an endless supply of the stuff, and I tolerated the habit in him as I would have in no other work colleague since it relaxed him and made him more amenable. Plus, it’s a cultural thing, isn’t it?” He addressed this remark to Albertine. “Part and parcel of the West Indian lifestyle, and the vodou tradition too. Isn’t that right, dear?”

  Albertine didn’t answer. Her only response was to mutter darkly under her breath, a string of words of which Lex caught just one: “patronising”.

  “So I disapproved,” said Seidelmann, “but couldn’t forbid it. In general I could have been firmer with him, but he continued to be helpful, if only intermittently, and he had already contributed so much to the project that I couldn’t begrudge him slacking off a little now. To be honest, I hadn’t even expected him to demonstrate anything like as much of a work ethic as he did in the initial days, given—again—certain cultural dispensations.”

  Now Albertine actively bristled. “I could shrivel his balls to the size of raisins,” she hissed.

  “I think they already are,” said Lex.

  Seidelmann continued his narrative, blithe to any offence he might be causing. “At the same time Deslorges appeared to be developing an obsession.”

  “With what?” asked Buckler.

  Seidelmann waved a hand. “With here. This installation. Anger Reef. He kept asking people about it: when was it built, how, why. He badgered everyone, even menials like the kitchen staff, but in particular Colonel Gonzalez. He wanted to know the structural specifications of the place, to see plans and blueprints if there were any. No one could help him there. I thought he was just bored and needed something to occupy his mind, a hobby. In a way I was gratified he was showing such an intellectual curiosity about his surroundings. So I suggested he go online, do some searches, see if he could unearth anything. I even let him use my own computer workstation for the purpose. Meanwhile I was busy prepping the first group of human volunteers to try out V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. on.”

  “Volunteers,” said Buckler. “Don’t tell me—convicts and such. Death row inmates looking to get their sentences commuted. People with nothing to lose.”

  “No, lieutenant. An interesting supposition, but in fact I drew on a pool of your own brethren.” Seidelmann said this with such a smug, sly air that Lex, already inclined to dislike the man, felt a spike of actual loathing for him.

  “Forces guys?”

  “Why not? The Pentagon sourced me a half-dozen individuals who were willing to do more for their mother country than strap on a rifle and march in line. To be fair, they were also a half-dozen individuals each of whom was facing a court-martial and the very real possibility of a stint in the stockade at Fort Leavenworth.”

  “Ah. Scumbags, then.”

  “I prefer to think of them as those not temperamentally cut out for a life of military discipline,” said Seidelmann. “Among them was a young private who had left another so badly injured and traumatised after a hazing ritual that the second private is now on antidepressants and cannot walk unaided. There was also an MPC specialist who conducted cruel and unusual abuse of terrorist suspects in captivity—guilty not so much for what he did as for being photographed doing it. Once the pictures were leaked onto the internet, his superiors realised they had no alternative but to make an example of him. All in all, these were six of the less pleasant members of your profession, who were given the choice of being guinea pigs for me, and receiving an other-than-honourable discharge and full pension, or jail time and a dishonourable discharge, with no subsequent veterans’ benefits at all. In their own interest and that of their dependants, they elected to take the former. Who can fault them for that?”

  “Yeah,” grumbled Tartaglione. “Goody for them.”

  “Regular saints,” Sampson added.

  “Shortly before we were due to begin the human trials, I came across Deslorges prowling the corridors of Sublevel Three, the lowest floor here, where most of the labs are. He was searching for something, it seemed. He kept pausing and listening out. He placed a hand on the walls, on the floor, as though trying to feel through them to detect something on the other side. I watched him a while, puzzled, until finally he became aware of me. First thing he said was, ‘Hear that?’ I couldn’t hear anything apart from the hum of the striplights. ‘He’s calling,’ Deslorges said. ‘Who is?’ I asked, but he wouldn’t specify. He just said, ‘He’s calling to me. Taunting me. Challenging me.’ Again I asked him who and he didn’t answer. All I got was this look—this look of wild-eyed anger that I still can’t account for. The whites of Deslorges’s eyes were glassy and pink. His pupils were markedly dilated. He reeked of marijuana smoke. I wondered if he was having some kind of psychotic episode, the kind that can be triggered by cannabinoids, especially when ingested in excessive quantities. However, he didn’t appear altered or maladaptive in any way. On the contrary, he looked and sounded perfectly cogent and normal. Sane. And that, I’m not afraid to admit, alarmed me somewhat.”

  “You’re saying you were scared?” said Lex.

  “Is that an English accent I detect?” said Seidelmann. “My, what a motley assortment you lot are.”

  “Just get on with it, prof,” said Buckler.

  “To answer your question, me old china,” Seidelmann said to Lex, “I think it did scare me. Gave me a chill, at least. I was forced to ask myself what sort of man I’d allied myself with, whether I’d misjudged him, been a little optimistic in my assessment of him. But I was preoccupied. My work was coming to a head. I couldn’t let myself be distracted by relatively minor concerns. Tomorrow was D-day, cru
nch time, the moment when I found out whether nearly a year’s worth of effort was going to bear fruit or be in vain. That was my principal focus.”

  Seidelmann heaved a deep, bleak sigh.

  “And that was when the horrors began.”

  AFTER A SHORT break to compose himself, Professor Seidelmann carried on.

  “They filed into the main lab, our six volunteers,” he said. “They looked anxious, and who can blame them? They knew nothing about what they were letting themselves in for. They joked and joshed with one another, but beneath the bravado you could sense the trepidation. We lay them down on gurneys, my assistants and I. We strapped them in. We inserted cannulas. We got everything ready. I went to the refrigerator to retrieve the phials of V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. I’d prepared a goodly number of doses of the formula. I knew something was awry the moment I took out the tray. A phial was missing.

  “Immediately I quizzed all the assistants. They denied guilt. They swore, to a man, that they hadn’t been in the lab since yesterday evening, when I’d last checked the trays. Knowing them as I did, I believed them. None of them had stolen the phial. Who, then? Who was the culprit? The only other person who had unfettered access to the lab, who owned a pass card and knew the entry code, was Deslorges.

  “He hadn’t turned up at the lab that morning, which had surprised me, as I’d thought he would be keen to see V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. used on humans for the first time—the payoff, as it were, for our months of collaborative effort. My suspicions were aroused. Deslorges had taken the phial. It had to be him. Why, though?

  “I sent someone off to fetch him. When that person didn’t return after twenty minutes, I sent someone else off. Meanwhile the volunteers were getting restive, starting to grumble and fret. I went ahead and administered each of them with twenty-five millilitres per hour of Propofol via a volumetric IV pump to induce conscious sedation, as I’d been planning to do anyway. That shut them up. Soon they were drifting off, happy in their own headspace.