Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4)

by James A. Hunter

  FIFTEEN:

  Cité Soleil

  Ferraro and I ghosted along the narrow, intricate back roads of Cité Soleil, wrapped in a thick veil of my making but still taking great pains to cling to the shadows and avoid any passersby. In a place like Haiti, white skin marked you out as surely as if you carried a flamethrower in one hand and a boom box blaring smooth jazz in the other. Being a foreigner here wasn’t necessarily tantamount to a death sentence, but at the very least, you should expect to be robbed, kidnapped, or shot in the legs on general principle of being an outsider.

  Sometimes Westerners visited places like Port-Au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, but no one visited Cité Soleil. No one. Even other Haitians stayed out, fearing the heavy-handed Chimeres: the brutal gangs who ran the streets, who ran everything. Even the Haitian government didn’t know what to do with this sprawling slum city or its gun-toting inhabitants. Wall it off? Burn it down? Leave it be, and just pretend the damned place didn’t exist? No one had an answer. Not really.

  There’s a good reason the Haitians are scared of this place, of the gangs. There was a good reason the U.N. described Cité Solei as the most dangerous place on Earth, despite being only a two-hour flight from the sunny shores of Miami.

  In this city, the Chimeres were everything, everywhere, and they were far more like machete-wielding tribal warlords than the street gangs we think of in America. Though Haiti did have a government and a police force, the labyrinth of Cité Solei belonged heart and soul to the gangs. They were the police. They were the law. They were life and death. One wrong step with them could get you murdered or worse—and in Haiti, there is certainly something worse than death, believe you me.

  We moved as quickly as we could, not speaking, instead on constant watch against any of a thousand threats that might cost us our lives. The roadway we crept along on was hard-packed brown earth ten feet wide, and covered with garbage of every variety: Fluttering scraps of paper. Soiled and torn clothing. Filthy plastic bottles. Broken glass. Human waste in fetid puddles. Behind us lay a pile of old tires, burning, smoldering, letting off noxious fumes; a few women, surrounded by a handful of youngsters, most under five, sat around the fire, warming themselves.

  On our left was a series of single-level shacks, made of overlapping sheets of corrugated tin, often rusted or riddled with bullet holes, which lent them a pockmarked, post-apocalyptic appearance. On the right were more of the tin hovels, leaning drunkenly against one another, supported by crude cinderblocks, rusted nails, and long wooden struts that poked through the walls and roofs like rotten teeth. Narrow alleyways littered the streets—claustrophobic, twisting things with clotheslines loaded down by colorful linens.

  We came up on the edge of the next street, which dead-ended at a rickety bridge—really a couple of warped two-by-fours sitting on a few car tires—which shot across a deep crevice five or six feet wide, flowing with sludgy water that reeked of shit and death. And I’m not exaggerating here. The smell was just awful. Imagine, if you will, a dead, bloated pig, cut open and pumped full of human waste. Disgusted? Good. Now take that waste-filled hog corpse, stitch it up, let it sit in the sun for a month, then string it up like a piñata and take a bat to it.

  That little picture is an accurate representation of what my nose was experiencing. And boy oh boy was it an effort of will not to projectile vomit all over the roadway.

  My steps faltered as I caught a snatch of pounding drums and a flutter of movement, dead ahead. I crept forward another few feet, repositioning myself so I could get a better looksee.

  Well, shit.

  Though our side of the street was empty and lifeless, the same couldn’t be said for the far side of shit-creek. The rickety, makeshift bridge connected to another narrow alleyway, which dumped onto a boulevard bursting with people. Bright torchlight filled the night with orange fire, illuminating the mob of folks streaming by in what looked like a parade. Men and women, many little more than skin and bones, hooted and hollered in time to a cadre of pounding drums—the sound primal, almost feral.

  What kind of jack-assery was this?

  I hunkered down into a crouch, watching the street, kicking around potential plans of action in the ol’ noggin. A moment later Ferraro leaned into me, pressing her mouth close to my ear.

  “That looks like a mess,” she whispered. “If we’re trying to keep a low profile, going in there is a bad, bad idea.”

  “Yeah,” I replied softly, and boy was she right. I didn’t know what that clusterfuck up ahead was, but I was reasonably certain I wanted no part of it. “But,” I said with a soft sigh, “we don’t have a lot of choice, do we? It’s not like Google maps is gonna get us where we need to be.”

  Currently, we were headed for the one place in Cité Soleil where we might find a helping hand and a little info. The Guild had an informant here. A crusty old boneman—a voodoo priest—who went by the name Pierre-Francois. Guy was a shriveled, sour, disagreeable bastard who ran a hoodoo shop, selling ritual ingredients and whipping up blessed fetishes. He wasn’t with the Guild, not powerful enough to make the cut, didn’t have the inclination either, but he knew his business well and dabbled in the darker areas of the craft.

  Specifically, necromancy.

  After James had dropped his little Haiti-hint a few months back, I’d asked around a bit—reminiscing about old times, really—and found out Pierre-Francois was still working out of the same shitty shanty shop. I’d worked with Pierre-Francois back in ’76, and though he wasn’t a good guy or a team player, he could be a reliable source of info.

  With a little friendly persuading.

  Pierre-Francois was also the only contact I had in Haiti, so I wasn’t exactly spoiled for choices.

  I surveyed the procession of revelers, many of them clearly intoxicated or strung out on one thing or another. “I’m pretty damn sure Pierre-Francois’s shop isn’t far from here, but if we turn back now and look for a different route, there’s a good chance we’re gonna get lost. We could end up wandering around this cesspool for a week. We just need to suck it up and find a way through. Stay low and follow me.”

  “You sure about this?” she asked, sounding more than a little wary.

  “Nope,” I replied, “but when am I ever sure of anything?”

  I stole across the wobbly bridge, then darted into the deep shadows, hugging the tin-walled buildings on the left. Once Ferraro was safely across, we edged closer until we finally got to the mouth of the alleyway, granting us an unrestricted view of the procession. People streamed in from the left. They appeared from a sharp bend in the hard-packed dirt road, meandered past us for twenty or so feet, then disappeared behind another twisting turn.

  Definitely a parade of some sort.

  Men and women danced by, many half-clothed, most painted with a chalky-white powder, haphazardly applied so the dancers looked like an army of skeletons. Many of the partygoers held torches aloft, greasy firelight playing across the whole scene, casting lurid shadows that made me queasy to look at. Several skeleton men marched by, bearing drums in varying sizes, their hands skipping and beating in frantic motion.

  The noise and intoxicating rhythm charged the air with primal lust and hunger.

  A lust and hunger that only the living know. The animal urge to feel, to breathe, to dance, to screw, to lose yourself in the hunt. The emotions conjured to the surface were base things, but not necessarily evil. Just wild. Free. Unrestricted. It was sheer celebration of what it meant to be alive.

  The darker part of me thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, watching mostly naked women amble by, their bodies lean and strong like prowling wolves, moving with an infectious natural grace. The baser part of me wanted to throw caution to the wind: wanted to leave the shadows, pull out a cigarette, and join the stream of humanity in their ancient jubilation.

  Yet, I stayed firmly hidden, because underneath the music was something sinister—a subtle current of Vis-conjured power that positively reeked of glamour. A working desi
gned to tap into that raw, feral emotion and create a feedback loop, which pumped the crowd up toward ever greater levels of frenzy. In an instant that unseen construct could push the partygoers over the edge of harmless hedonism and into the clutches of homicidal rage. Whoever was controlling the construct was screwing around with some dangerous shit. Made me nervous.

  So, Ferraro and I stayed crouched and hidden, pressed up against a tin wall, waiting, watching, knowing the procession had to end eventually and then we could get back on our way once more.

  That nervousness, roiling around in the pit of my stomach, ratcheted up another notch the moment the convoy at the end of the winding procession pulled into view. Several vehicles made up the small fleet. A beat-to-shit pickup truck—shocks squeaky and shot all to hell, paint peeling, windshield simply missing—rolled by with guns pointing out from every conceivable orifice, transforming the vehicle into a mechanical hedgehog. The cab was filled with skeleton-painted men holding AKs and M16s. The truck bed, by contrast, was filled with kids.

  Hard-faced boys, all probably under thirteen or fourteen, with thin arms and haunted, hollow stares. Most were shirtless, showcasing protruding bellies and sunken chests, often tattooed with horrendous scars: Puckered, badly healed bullet wounds. Huge, jagged knife slashes crisscrossing chests, arms, and backs. A few had big swatches of burned skin. Those kids had scars even most veteran soldiers would grimace at, and they were children.

  Kids, for fuck sake.

  Kids that should’ve been in school. Should’ve been playing baseball in some overgrown field or kicking around a soccer ball in someone’s backyard. Should’ve been goofin’ around in a creek, catching bugs and lizards and fish. Instead, they’d been turned into soldiers, their youth stripped away, stolen, replaced with a headful of nightmares and a handful of bullets. I’d seen shit like this before, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  If anything, it made it worse.

  Seeing those children brought back the god-awful memory of my first kill—one of the worst memories I have, and trust me I have some real whoppers. That’d been back in Nam, damn near forty-five years ago, and sometimes I still saw his face at nights. This smooth-faced Vietnamese kid, with a narrow, caved-in chest, wearing one of those dirty and ill-fitting gray uniforms the VC slunk around in. Probably didn’t have to shave more than once a month, that kid. Fourteen or fifteen? A little older than the boys in the pickup, but certainly not old enough to have a steady girlfriend.

  But, like the Haitians in the truck, he’d held a no-nonsense AK-47 in trembling hands, and had a little Chinese K-54 pistol tucked in the waistband of his trousers. He might’ve been a kid, but those weapons were all adult and all business.

  In the end, it’d been him or me. And, much as I hate to say it, I picked me.

  I’d put three quick shots—measured fire suppression, disciplined marksmanship—right into his chest, tight around his heart. Watched as that poor kid died. And it wasn’t a quick death, like it sometimes is in the movies. He toppled over, lungs heaving and racking, red spurting out from his mouth in great gobs. He moaned for a while, the sound wet and choking, as life leaked away, one pump of his dying heart at a time. Friggin’ nightmare.

  Another dilapidated truck cruised by, filled with even more rough-edged child-soldiers. In many ways, the scar-laden recruits could’ve been brothers to that kid in the Vietnamese Bush. Their skin was darker, true, but they had the same stoop to their shoulders, had the same broken-spirit eyes, gripped the same oversized weapons in frail, too small hands.

  This whole situation was too much like my time in Nam for comfort.

  My lips pulled back in a silent snarl, a rictus of hate, and I found myself reaching out to the Vis, drawing in deeply, ready to murder the bastard son of a bitch who would do that to a bunch of innocent children. I felt Azazel stirring inside my soul, flexing leathery wings and stretching scarred arms in anticipation of his freedom.

  I didn’t care, not in the moment.

  Vis flooded into me, burning me up with unimaginable heat, followed by a tidal rush of freezing Nox swirling in my veins. The two dueling forces pulsed inside me, dancing as my head thumped in time to the chaotic drumming. Without a thought I began to form the weaves for a nasty earth-based construct, while, simultaneously, my hand slid around the pistol grip of my gun. I pulled it from its holster with a soft rasp of metal on leather.

  Ferraro clamped a hand on my forearm, fingers flexing, digging in. “What in the hell are you doing?” she hissed. “We can’t fight that. You’ll get us both killed.” I jerked my arm away, ready to lash out at her for interfering, then halted as a third vehicle pulled around the bend. In a flash, an eyeblink, all my righteous indignation and hate faded, replaced by a combination of shock and panic.

  Fear, raw and overwhelming, came next.

  The truck was much the same as the first two, though of better quality:

  A newer model with fewer dings and dents, a fresh coat of paint, and even an intact windshield protecting the driver within. But instead of child-soldiers lining the truck bed, staring out with eyes that’d seen too much, there was a mammoth throne erected in the center of the vehicle. A huge chair fashioned from old driftwood, a hundred pieces of yellowed bone, and alligator hide. The thing screamed Voodoo at the top of its lungs.

  Worse still, I knew the man lounging in the gaudy chair. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in my mind. I knew that asshole because I’d murdered him thirty friggin’ years ago.

  Pa Beauvoir, the Voodoo Daddy himself.

  Now let’s get something straight—when I say I murdered him, I mean royally smoked his ass for keeps. It’s not like he was mortally wounded, but clinging on to dear life, as I left him for dead like some kinda idiot movie hero. Nope. I one hundred percent killed his voodoo ass. Planted a bullet through one eye and blew out the back of his skull in the process. Painted one of his walls with pink mist and splatters of gray matter. It was the kinda wound no one anywhere, ever, walks away from. Period. Full stop.

  He couldn’t be alive.

  It was absolutely, fundamentally impossible.

  But, nevertheless, there he was, looking pretty damn active for a dead man, sprawled in his chair, one leg draped over the arm with a shit-eating smirk plastered all over his face.

  The Voodoo Daddy was a tall, gaunt fella with short cropped hair, thick eyebrows, and a thin pencil mustache. He had a hard-angled face lined with a host of scars and had skin as black as rich graveyard dirt. Like the other partygoers, he had chalky dust caked to his body and smeared over his face, giving him the appearance of a walking corpse, which is exactly what he was. He wore a dusty top hat, a rhinestone encrusted tuxedo jacket, and black slacks, but no shirt, which showcased his emaciated torso.

  As the motorcade crawled past, he turned his face toward Ferraro and me, searching the shadows of the alleyway as though he somehow knew we were there lurking, hiding, cowering. He had a gaping hole in his head, a deep empty gouge where his left eye should’ve been, but wasn’t. Thanks to me. Thanks to the hand cannon I was currently holding, ready to finish the job right and proper if I could get the chance.

  He smiled, and I caught a glint of gold in his mouth as his perpetual grin widened. Then, almost before I knew it, the truck was plodding past, fat tires crunching over the dirt, taking the Voodoo Daddy with it. One final truck passed by and then the procession thinned and tapered away, leaving behind an eerie quiet in its wake.

  “What just happened?” Ferraro asked, standing, stealing a fugitive look both ways, shotgun at the low ready. “For a second there I was sure you were going to stampede off into the mess, shooting indiscriminately, and then you just locked up. The guy in the truck, who is he to you?” she demanded, her voice quiet but sure.

  “Big, big trouble, is who he is to me,” I said. “I don’t know how in the hell that shitstick is breathing, but that was Pa Beauvoir.”

  Her breath caught in her throat in a strangled wheeze. I’d given her a hasty
rundown on Haiti and my past dealings here, so she knew what it meant. “I thought you said he was dead,” she said, dropping back into a wary crouch.

  “He was,” I replied. “He is, dammit. But apparently he’s found a way around that, which sucks a school bus full of ass, because that guy’s a certifiable nightmare.”

  “What’re the chances that we’re going to cross paths with him?” she asked, running a hand along the barrel of her shotgun.

  “Far higher than I’d care to wager on,” I said, standing. “Let’s get to Pierre-Francois’s place—we need to find out what in the backwards hell is going on here.”

  SIXTEEN:

  Boneman

  It took us another half hour of steady trekking before we finally made it to Pierre-Francois’s hoodoo shop, though thankfully our trip went down without further incident. No one spotted us, or, if they did, they showed no interest in stopping us, which was good for them. After seeing Pa Beauvoir riding around like the Voodoo King of Haiti, I was as tightly wound as a yo-yo; if anyone had tried to stop me, there was a damn good chance I would’ve nuked ’em purely on instinct.

  Ferraro likewise seemed tense. Shoulders tight, shotgun always at the low ready, as if anticipating a surprise ambush around every corner. She treated every shadow, every crevice—some not even big enough to conceal a shit-caked rat—as if it might somehow conceal an army. Paranoid, yes. But in this line of work a little cultivated paranoia could often save your ass.

  I breathed out a long sigh of relief when we finally cut through another confining alley, partially blocked by an emaciated woman sleeping in a wheelbarrow, and caught sight of Pierre-Francois’s place. Instead of a single family hovel, it was actually a small complex of interconnected buildings surrounded by a high wall of thick, pitted concrete, broken only by a solid iron fence.