by Steve Perry
As a doctor, he had seen more than a few strange things when it came to injuries. Once, a man had come to a traveling clinic complaining of a headache. Gruber had not done the initial examination and workup, one of the assistants had, but when he read the chart and saw the patient, the case had seemed unremarkable. A headache of a few days’ duration, not terrible, but annoying. No other significant medical history, according to the chart. The patient was not a drinker or a drug addict, he had no other signs or symptoms, he’d been a farmer.
When Gruber had run his hands over the man’s head, he had felt a small bump near the center of the patient’s skull, between the frontal and parietal bones, along the coronal suture. He asked about it, but the patient shrugged and said the bump had been there a long time. Years.
Suspecting a tumor, Gruber ordered up a series of Röntgenographs, even though such images of the brain were not always useful. This time, however, they were. Once the pictures were developed, he instantly saw the problem:
Somebody had driven a large nail into the man’s head, straight down from the top. Six inches long, and miraculously, it seemed, the nail had not damaged any neural tissue, but had slotted neatly between the left and right hemispheres of his brain.
Gruber had never seen anything like it. Fascinating!
Upon questioning, the man finally admitted, that yes, some years earlier, he had been possessed by a demon, and that the only way to disable the thing had been to attack it where it lived, inside his head. To this end, he had placed the point of a copper nail against his skull and hammered it in. Had to be copper to work, he explained, since steel would eventually rust from the demon’s acidic saliva. He had skewered the demon, he said, but not killed it, and so the nail had to remain in place to prevent the creature from escaping to elsewhere in his body, where it might not be so easily reached next time.
Apparently the hair and skin had grown over the nail’s head after some time, leaving only the little bump visible from without.
As incredible as this had been, the patient had explained it all in a completely matter-of-fact manner, attaching no significance to the fantastic aspects. It sounded rather like somebody relating offhandedly how he had found a weed in his garden and had pulled it up. Ja, I had a demon in my head, so I hammered a copper nail into my skull to transfix it. Hardly remarkable, what else could I do?
Gruber had been more than a little taken aback. He had given the man some pain pills, and after checking on him the next day—the pills had done the trick, his headache was gone—he’d sent him on his way. Pulling the nail out? That might have done more harm than good. If it had been there for years, it obviously wasn’t doing all that much damage. Fiddling around inside someone’s head was seldom a good idea, given how fragile those tissues could be; besides which, the patient would not have allowed it anyhow. So there it was.
So, a bullet that should have killed a man but did not? Certainly not the most unusual thing Gruber had ever heard or seen, not even close.
Still, even in such cases as keeping pain at bay and preventing blood loss, it would be a wondrous thing, and the event had provided some evidence of this. Certainly worth the effort to attain the means by which it could be accomplished.
Well, that’s what he was here for, nicht war? He had a team of crack German soldiers at his command, and on an island this size they could never be all that far from the goal.
It was only a matter of time until he attained it. Then he could go home. And that in itself would be reward enough. To sit in a castle somewhere, dining and drinking with the wealthy. Even though the Führer was not particularly fond of nobility, he probably wouldn’t abolish it altogether; there were times when the idea of nobility was useful. Perhaps after the war, Gruber might be able to put a von in front of his name and become a baron.
Baron von Gruber—that had a nice ring to it.
No matter, no matter. As a doctor and favored by Herr Hitler, he would be a man of substance. A title was not necessary—if you had enough Reichsmarks, you could buy anything you wanted.
And you could spend them at home, like a civilized person.
TWELVE
INDY WAS WILLING to take what he thought of as reasonable risks, always had been. Now and then, maybe some that, in retrospect, didn’t seem so reasonable. But, also being pragmatic when it came to keeping his hide in one relatively unbattered piece, he did ask Marie the question as they were doing final packing to head out, just after dawn.
“So, if your great-great-times-however-many-uncle’s friends come to call again and you’re taking a nap or something, how do we stop them?”
“It is difficult,” she said.
“Yeah, I kinda got that when I saw them shrugging off bullets like they were cotton balls.”
“A true zombi has no soul, and its body is kept motivated by magic. They feel no pain, no hunger, they do not tire. They are like automata. But for the most part, they are otherwise limited to what human bodies can do—they cannot fly, for instance, nor can they walk on water.”
“That’s the good news, I suppose.”
“Their hearts do not beat, nor do they breathe, but their brains work, after a fashion, as do their eyes and ears. Plug a zombi’s ears, it cannot hear. Poke out its eyes, it cannot see. Offer enough injury to its brain, and it will stop it. A hot enough fire will destroy it.”
“So you are saying—”
“If you stab it in the eyes, it will be blind. If you lop off half its head, it will collapse. Burn it to ash, it is finished. But a few bullets to the body won’t stop it.”
“Ah.”
Mac sidled over. “What was that last business? I didn’t quite catch it.”
“Marie says that if our undead friends drop by for more fun and games, we need to shoot their eyes out, chop their heads off, or broil them well done.”
Mac raised his eyebrows. “Tricky shooting, trying for the eyes. Perhaps we might wish to hone our machetes and keep a couple within reach. I don’t supposed you brought a flamethrower?”
“Left it in my other suit,” Indy said.
“Boukman cannot keep many of them animated at once,” Marie said. “Though he has more Children of the Potion he can use.”
“They bulletproof, too?”
“They are somewhat hardier than normal people, but not immune to injury in the same way, no. Hard to kill, but it can be done.”
“So our best plan is to move fast, get done, and hurry away,” Indy said. “Or go and take them all out.”
“Yes. I would vote for the former,” she said.
Indy shrugged. He liked being proactive when it was useful, but running around hunting down creatures who were hard to kill might take longer than it was worth.
Batiste, who had hired five men to go along, using up a fair amount of Mac’s gold coins to convince them it was worth the risk, came to where Indy, Marie, and Mac stood. “The first part of the hike will be the easiest,” he said. “There are a number of trails around the village, and we can use these. Perhaps half a day before we have to start finding or making other paths. And the terrain is worse the farther away we travel. The village is on the flattest part of the island; the land grows steeper, rockier, and is crisscrossed with streams, some of which are deep, as well as narrow and quite steep gorges. Some of the streams can be forded; some may require that we construct bridges. The gorges we can avoid, we will circle around; those we cannot bypass, we will have to descend and ascend with care. A distance that can be easily walked in an hour on flat ground might take ten times that long, or longer, in places.”
Batiste looked at the sky, which was clear. “We’ll get a rain shower later today, probably not much of one.”
“Well, we aren’t getting any younger,” Indy said.
And so they set off.
True to what Batiste said, the first couple of hours were easy going. The path through the forest was wide enough for three people to walk side by side, the dirt well trodden, and only the occasional
spider’s web or creeper reaching from the woods on either side to impede their progress. Easier to walk around those than to bother cutting them.
He didn’t see a single snake, for which he was grateful and somewhat surprised.
Before noon, they had made what Indy would consider substantial progress. Of course, according to Batiste, they would walk eight or ten times the distance that it would take a bird to fly, so a four- or five-mile flight could easily become a thirty- or forty-mile hike, maybe longer; it would depend on what had to be crossed or circumvented.
Indy knew about jungle travel, and the shortest distance between two points might be a straight line in theory, but in practice that was seldom how you got to do it.
Just once, he’d like to arrive at the site of an archaeological trove, drive up on a nice paved road, collect what he’d come for off a shelf without even having to bend down for it, and go back to his vehicle and drive away. No spiders, scorpions, crazed Nazis, ancient knights, curses, or walking dead. No snakes. Just once . . .
The way his adventures had gone, he wouldn’t be at all surprised to look up one day and see a spaceship full of little green men from Mars dogging his heels . . .
He smiled at that image.
As they moved farther from the village, the route narrowed and grew more twisty. The damp-earth and pollen smell of the rain forest intensified. From other, more pungent scents, Indy knew their path had been an animal trail at some point—and that you needed to watch your step. The largest animals here, Marie had told them, were wild pigs, going to a couple hundred pounds and nasty in a pack, but apt to run rather than fight. It was easier to follow the crooked path they created on their meanderings and step carefully than to cut a straight new path. Much easier. He had bought a new pair of leather gloves at the store, to help prevent blisters once they had to start swinging sharp blades to clear their way, but even so, that was hard and sweaty work, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.
Still, so far it wasn’t so bad, all things considered.
A moment later it was as if they were standing in some god’s shower stall. A tropical frog-drowner, so heavy you could barely see ten feet, and accompanied by lightning, thunder, and wind.
If Batiste thought this wasn’t much of a rain, Indy didn’t want to see what he thought was a hard one.
Batiste came over. He had to yell to be heard over the spatters against the forest’s greenery. “We should stop, put up a tarp!”
“Little late to worry about staying dry!” Indy yelled back. But he had a point. Walking in the dark or during a downpour like this was risky. Easy to step into a hole or trip on a root when you couldn’t see it.
Dry socks was the other thing they didn’t tell you about in school. Indy always tried to bring two or three pairs, stuffed into a waterproof pouch for just such situations as this. Always room for socks . . .
Blisters on your hands were one thing; on your feet, they were ever so much worse. It was sometimes the little things that made a hard trip bearable.
Yamada worked out, alone in the rain.
They were in a small clearing next to a trail, and he was completely soaked, so moving around under the cloudburst didn’t make him any wetter.
Their quarry was perhaps half a kilometer away, but they could be a hundred meters and not know it. The rain assaulted the ears, the eyes, the skin . . .
He raised his wooden practice sword, the bokken, into a basic two-handed guard, shifting his weight forward, his right foot leading.
Ready . . .
Kendo was, technically, the way of the sword, though that art was done mostly with bamboo or wooden blades. Iaijutsu was with the live blade and designed for combat, not to strengthen one’s spirit, as a do usually was. Yes, it was true that an archer who trained diligently in kyudo could hit a target with his arrows, but cultivating one’s Zen mind was not the same as skewering one’s enemies. Yamada would rather have an angry and excitable archer who could hit his target every time guarding his back than a Zen master who was unruffled, but couldn’t shoot straight.
Here, in this tropical hole with the rain pounding the verdant jungle and blurring everything into a torrential gray, Yamada, alone outside the hastily erected tents, did his practice with a wooden sword. No need to expose his precious real blade to such elements unless it was necessary.
He faced an imaginary opponent and lifted his wooden blade high for the cut to the head.
He brought the sword down, hard, drawing back a bit, wrists locked, one hand behind the tsuba, the other at the end for leverage.
“Hah!” The sound was guttural and harsh, not particularly loud against the backdrop of the rain rattling the trees and fat-leaved bushes. It wasn’t volume that mattered in the kiai, in any event, but focus. A strong enough kiai had been known to stun an attacker into immobility long enough that he could be cut down.
Had a real attacker been there and this wooden sword been sharp steel, Yamada would have bisected the head to the chin. Even with the bokken, such a blow would have cracked a skull and knocked a man senseless.
In kendo, there were restrictions on where a cut or stab could be offered. The proper targets were the top and sides of the head, the right wrist—but only if upraised, so as to allow blood from it to flow into the eyes—the ribs, and the thrust to the throat. Seven targets, no more. Very stylized. Wearing armor, using bamboo blades—shinai—one might get a bruise now and then, but there was no real danger.
In real combat, there were no limits—you could cut a man off at the ankles or stab him in the groin if you could manage it. Victory was more important than form—though form must be considered. It was possible to do both.
Now Japanese soldiers fought with guns in combat, like other modern armies, and had for a long time. The sword was still carried onto the field of battle, however, and used now and again to dispatch one’s enemies.
Wrapped in protective oilcloth in his tent, Yamada had his family katana, wearing the army’s cheap furniture and looking like one of the machine-made blades issued to the troops. Many officers did as he did—re-dressed a revered family sword in the handle and guard and sheath of the issue weapon, and tossed the cheap steel blade away. Yamada’s katana was four hundred years old, gleamed like a mirror, and had been hammered and folded by a master smith in a time when such a weapon was worth a year’s pay. You could see the layers in the polished steel. The hamon—the temper line that gave a hard edge backed by a flexible body—was called cranes-in-flight.
His sword was as beautiful as it was deadly. The sword was the soul of the samurai.
Only a man ready to die would charge a machine gun with nothing save a sword. After the machine gun was blown up by a grenade and the wounded enemies taken prisoner?
A wounded and soon-to-be-dead-anyway captive could be used to practice one’s stroke. Any idiot with a strong arm and a sharp blade could lop off a man’s head; an expert could slice through the bone and muscle but leave a small bit of skin at the throat, so that the head stayed connected to the body. When someone had elected—or been ordered—to commit seppuku, once the belly was slit, it was appropriate to allow a friend or relative acting as a second to finish the job by taking the head. But—for the second to allow his stroke to completely decapitate the suicide? Well, that was bad form. And practice on living tissue was, in these modern times, harder to manage. At the height of the samurai period, a man allowed to wear the two swords could pick anyone of low status he wished and kill him for any number of reasons, and because he felt like it and needed the practice was enough. No one would blink at such a thing. When a man was hungry and sheep were there, who would speak for the sheep?
Since the wearing of swords had been banned sixty-seven years ago by the Meiji emperor Mutsuhito—a black day, that—the samurai class had been effectively destroyed. Yamada’s grandfather had been the last in his family to wear both wakizashi and katana, and Yamada remembered the old man’s stories of how many samurai had taken their own lives o
n the day the order banning swords as public wear had gone into effect.
“Mutsuhito was possessed of an akumi,” the old man had told a wide-eyed Yamada when he’d been a boy of but six or eight. “He was not the real emperor, though none dared say so aloud. A powerful evil spirit infested him and bade him destroy the samurai class, and this he did.”
The old man would always spit on the ground at this point, and such an action inside the house irritated Yamada’s mother no end, but there was nothing she could say about that, either. Her husband’s father was not to be berated for such things by a woman.
“Never forget, little Hajime, that you are a samurai, no matter what anyone says. You must learn the code of Bushido and live by it.”
Yamada had nodded, and he had made some effort to keep to the code. He had learned the arts, martial and intellectual. He could compose poetry, draw with ink and brush; he had even helped cast his own tsuba, the brass guard for his sword, a blade that had belonged to his grandfather, and his grandfather’s grandfather before that.
And yes, he had, a few times, availed himself of captives, or even condemned Japanese criminals, to practice his cutting. His sword was a three-body blade, which meant it could slice through three men stacked one upon another. Inscribed into the tang of the blade, hidden under the handle, along with the name of the smith and the season the sword had been made, were the date and name of the man who had performed the body test. Three men had been used. Sometimes it was done with corpses, but in this case the tang recorded that the men used in the test had been alive.
There was a story his grandfather used to tell, about a certain condemned samurai who knew he would be used for cutting practice thus. Denied the right to commit suicide, the night before, the man had gone into the sand garden outside his home for a final meal. He was not kept in prison, of course, Hajime’s grandfather had told him, for although he had been forbidden to take his own life, his honor had been sufficient to assure that he would turn up on the appointed morning scheduled for his death. But for his last meal, he had sat down and slowly and carefully eaten several pounds of smooth stones. Enough to fill his belly from top to bottom.