by Mike Leon
have dangled around her neck all night long. A flaming pyre built from sticks and logs rages nearby and the faces of the walking dead reflect the dim orange light all along the periphery.
Dominique screams.
“Somebody help!” she wails up at the sky. “Somebody help me!”
“Nobody’s comin’ for ya sweet girl,” the dark one says. His stovepipe hat looms over Dominique as he runs his fingers gently over her belly.
“What are you?” she cries. “Why are you doing this?”
“Jus’ one dat serve w’ both hands is all, girl.”
She’s lived here long enough to know what that means. She’s been to the crackpot museums and tourist traps with their gris-gris and dolls, but she never paid much mind to any of that make-believe. Now the living proof stands before her—the bokor, a practitioner of black magic, said to steal men’s souls.
“No. No!” Dominique says. “You can’t be real!”
“I’m real as you are now cause I ride dis horse,” he says. “Now I brought ya here for my woman to have ya, and ya got skin so perfect.”
He caresses her breasts with his freezing cold palm and Dominique shivers.
No one is coming for her here. She doesn’t even know where here is. The hotel is lost to her in the black, somewhere far beyond the trees. All she sees are granite carved epitaphs and ancient woods. If the stranger is out there, he certainly knows she took his money by now. He probably already raided her car to retrieve what belongs to him and headed off to whatever strange adventure awaits him next.
She screams again for help that will never appear. Her screams arouse a sinister smile from the dark one, which turns into a chuckle, then rises into hysterical laughter.
He reaches away from the icy stone to which she is affixed and he picks up something that draws a shriek from her—a bleached human skull. The top of it is gone, carved away to expose a wide open and empty braincase.
“Oh god. Oh God,” she repeats.
“God? You about to become a god! Ya lucked out, girl. Mos’ don’ ever be much more den worm food, but you can have eternity!”
“No! Please let me go!”
“It couldn’t o’ been a better night for ya ta walk into da hotel ‘ere. I been waitin’ a long fuckin’ time for da stars to be jus’ right. MMmmmmm, jus’ right.”
“There are no stars tonight!”
“Jus’ cause ya can’t see ‘em don’t mean dey ain’t there.”
The bokor plucks something from the ground at his feet and sets it down on the sarcophagus next to Cindy’s head. It’s a handle of dark brown rum with an old paper label. Cindy can see red peppers pressed up against the glass.
The bokor twists the cap away from it and sniffs at the bottle neck. “Mmmm. Da good stuff,” he says as he tilts the bottle to pour the concoction into the hollow cranium. The searing smell of the liquid burns Dominique’s nose and makes her eyes water. Once the skull-cup is filled to the brim, the bokor takes a swig of the rum himself.
“Aahhh,” he breathes. “Tasty. Now ya be a good horse and drink.”
He picks up the skull-cup and holds it to Dominique’s cheek. Some of the rum sloshes over the side and drips onto her face. It stings.
“No! No!” she screams. The bokor motions for assistance and two of the walking corpses shamble over to the side of the sarcophagus. One is a mud-covered skeleton. The other Dominique recognizes as the desk attendant from the hotel, though now her frizzy red hair flares outward at many messy angles and her head sits mounted closer to one shoulder than the other. The desk attendant puts her cold damp fingers into Dominique’s screaming mouth to hold her jaw open as the skeleton keeps her head steady.
The bokor pinches her nose and pours his fiery sludge into her mouth. She feels it sizzle against her tongue. It feels like drinking acid. The fumes go up her nose and down her throat. She coughs fire, but the bokor keeps pouring more and more of the stuff into her. She forces down mouthful after mouthful just to catch what little breath she can between gulps.
Then all of the pain goes away. She no longer struggles. She finishes the last of her drink in calm compliance. Her muscles relax as she feels nothing but an overwhelming desire to please her new master.
The bokor sets the empty cup back on the sarcophagus and the dead withdraw from holding her in place. The bokor uses a bone knife to cut the leather straps that bind her to the stone.
“Now, girl,” he says. “Show us how ya dance.”
“Yes, master,” Dominique replies. She sits up and scoots to the edge of the sarcophagus before dropping down to the muddy grass with her bare feet.
“Rhythm section! Ha HA!” the bokor bellows into the rotting crowd.
Without any delay, three of them come forward with heavy drums made from bone and stretched hides. The beat begins.
BOOM BA DOOM BA DOOM BA DOOM.
Dominique throws her arms in the air and howls at the sky as lightning strikes the pyre. She throws her hair back and shakes her hips. She spins. She twerks. She dances like the sun won’t be coming up tomorrow, and for all she knows, it won’t.
BOOM BA DOOM BA DOOM BA DOOM.
“Mama!” the bokor shouts into the starless black. “I got somethin’ for ya!”
The pyre rises. The flames become like a fiery dervish that stretches nearly to the tops of the trees. With it comes something Dominique first thinks is only the night wind blowing through the forest, but she quickly realizes the syllables form too perfectly.
“I BE SEEIN’ IT,” the voice calls.
Suddenly, the drumming comes to an abrupt halt.
The dead acolytes stir as the stranger makes his presence known by carving one of the drummers to a half dozen pieces. Limbs flop and sail in all directions as the stranger hacks the thing to bits and starts in on the next. He wears black pants and boots which are muddy from trekking through the forest. His raging chest expands and he roars at his enemies. He rises above them like a giant, swinging and striking with two enormous blades that cleave through meat and bone in flawless fluid motions.
A group of them gathers to stop his progress and he cleaves their heads away with one swipe of a machete. In another second he has taken the arms from all of them and then the legs as well. He continues into the crowd of the dead without any sign of fatigue.
“Kill him!” screams the bokor, specks of spittle blow from his mouth to give away the secret that is his humanity. Dominique would spit on him herself if she could, but her body does not respond in any way except to lie still.
Another shambling mass of them move for the stranger, but he is faster than any man Dominique has ever seen. He slices the head from one thing and then cuts it down the middle so that the bisected halves clatter to the floor with one arm and one leg each. He dashes behind another and lashes out with both blades at the same time to cut a wide X shaped pattern that leaves it in four pieces. He makes similarly quick work of several more.
The stranger spins his blades over the fallen dead and calls out to the bokor.
“That all you got, dickbag?” the stranger yells.
The bokor betrays himself briefly with a look of disbelief at this insolent swine. Then he snatches up his bottle of rum from the sarcophagus and picks a stick from the base of the burning fire.
More of the dead approach the stranger, stumbling into an awkward charge as the stranger confidently twirls his blades. The bokor makes sure his minions will not so easily be cut down this time. Chugging rum from the huge bottle, he extends the flaming stick in his other hand. Then he leans forward and spits a jet of flame that carries for twenty meters. He sprays it across the charging dead and sets them aflame.
The stranger screams as he dashes forward to hack a dozen flaming zombies apart. He bats the blazing skull from the first and it sails through the air, coming to rest at Dominique’s feet. Burning hands grasp for the stranger. Mouths that spew acrid black smoke bite at him. Still, he is an unrelenting engine of destruction, smashing their bones and spilling the
ir cold blood across the swampy ground before them.
The bokor chugs his whiskey again and holds up his torch. Dominique thinks to call out in warning, but she does not. She cannot defy her master.
The stranger picks up a cadaver and throws it into the oncoming spray of fire as he weaves out of the way. He steps the other direction to avoid another burning blast and then he cleaves asunder another of the monsters, the desk attendant that helped force that horrible swill down Dominique’s throat. The stranger cuts through her torso with both blades from shoulder to crotch and three pieces tumble to the ground—a spinal section, and two flopping sets of limbs.
“Ya can’t stop a god, ya stupid pig!” the bokor shouts. “I got powers ya can’t even imagine!” He spits another jet of flame, but the stranger winds up and throws a single machete straight down the center of the burning stream. It arcs downward along its lengthy trip to stake the bokor in the sternum.
The sorcerer chokes and dribbles bits of burning rum down on the massive knife that sticks from his chest. He places his quivering hands on the blade with intent to pull it free, but the stranger grabs hold of the machete blade, having already covered the distance between them. The stranger pushes the blade deeper into the bokor’s body and Dominique sees the tip erupt from his back with a trickle of his black blood. The stranger draws back his right foot and then snaps it upward to kick the bokor in the testicles. Then he swings the other machete around to sever the sorcerer’s