Haitian Harbinger

by Lincoln Matt

  The man hesitated, still standing only on one foot with one of my arms wrapped around his wrists and the other keeping his gun trained downward. I noticed a wildness in his eyes, and his pupils dilated as his gaze darted all around the hut seemingly at once.

  He was on something, that was for sure, though I doubted it was this new drug. Probably speed or some other stimulant. Or a combination of stimulants.

  But of sound mind or not, he was still armed and dangerous, and he was big too, with broad shoulders and bulging muscles. I didn’t doubt for a second that if I didn’t have Holm with me, this guy could take me in a one-on-one fight.

  For a moment, I thought he was going to surrender, but he made a break for it, plowing his forehead right into mine with as much brute force as he could muster and wrestling his gun from where I’d stuck it when I took it from him. Like the human tractor he was, he bulldozed right over me and out of the door of the hut, hobbling the entire way. Then, when he reached the doorway, he turned back around and made to shoot at us again.

  It all happened so fast that Holm and I almost didn’t have time to react. But then we both swiveled and shot at him so fast that we must’ve hit him five times between us.

  Blood swelled across the bullet holes in his torso, staining his plain white tee shirt. He hobbled forward a couple more times, then fell to the ground. He struggled for a moment there, digging his fingers into the dirt floor and trying in vain to pull himself forward, but then he collapsed limp and lifeless against the earth.

  I re-holstered my gun and leaned my hands against my knees, hanging my throbbing head down for a moment. He’d hit me real good, and I could already feel a goose egg swelling up on my forehead, and probably a hefty set of bruises to boot. My eyes welled with tears, and the world started to swim around me.

  I could vaguely hear Holm making his way around the small hut, casing the place to make sure that the guy we’d killed had been the only one there. Finally, I heard him start to climb up the ladder and into the attic area where the thug had come from.

  I rose and made my way over to the foot of the ladder so I could cover him, the world around me having stabilized slightly by then. I wiped the water out of my eyes, which still stung from the blow the guy had dealt me, and redrew my weapon, holding it at my side and listening closely to what was going on in the attic area.

  “We’re all clear,” Holm called down after several agonizing moments. “You’d better come up here. There’s a first aid kit you could use. And some other stuff, too. I think there are some keys in here, might be for the car.”

  Slowly, I re-holstered my gun and reached out to climb up the ladder. It was slow going. I was afraid I could be nursing a concussion here. That guy was practically a walking tank, and he’d plowed right into me headfirst.

  Holm, noticing my state, reached down and helped me up when I was close enough to him.

  “You okay there, partner?” he asked, concern etched across his face. “Careful now, don’t stand up too straight, or you’ll hit your head on the ceiling.”

  “I’m fine,” I said dismissively as I surveyed the area.

  The attic area was small, basically a nook above the main hut. Holm was right. I couldn’t stand up all the way without hitting my head on the arched wooden ceiling.

  The place had about as much mess as the main hut crammed into a much smaller space. There were wrappers and crumbs and dirty dishes all over the floor, and the sleeping bag crumpled up in the corner was draped with old clothes. There was a small pile of stuff leaning in the opposite corner.

  “I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” I said, finding a relatively clear area and leaning down in a cross-legged position.

  I gingerly reached up and touched my forehead. As I’d suspected, a large bump had already formed there, and it stung to the touch. My head ached and throbbed, and I could still hear my heart pounding in my ears.

  “How do I look?” I asked as I lowered my hand from my forehead with a wince.

  “You’ve been better,” Holm told me honestly. “Here.”

  He handed me some kind of ointment and gauze. I blinked at it.

  “Am I bleeding?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed that.

  “Uh, yeah,” Holm said with a nervous chuckle.

  I looked down at my hand and realized that there was blood on it from when I touched my forehead. How had I not noticed that?

  Holm cracked one of those disposable ice packs against his leg and handed it to me as I mopped myself up and applied the ointment and gauze.

  “Better?” I asked when I was done.

  “Slightly less ghastly,” he said with a grin.

  I gingerly pressed the ice pack against my head over the gauze, which made it sting a little less. It still throbbed, though.

  “How come it’s always me getting beat up on this one?” I complained. “Usually, you’re the one getting yourself into all the trouble.”

  Sure enough, Holm had even gotten himself kidnapped on one of our more recent missions abroad.

  “I guess it’s overdue, then,” he laughed. “I’ve caught a break.”

  “More like passed all your bad voodoo over to me for a change,” I retorted.

  We both chuckled at this despite ourselves and then sat in silence for some time while I nursed my wounds.

  “You doing okay?” he asked, looking at me with concern once again.

  “Yes, it’s getting better,” I said truthfully. The throbbing was subsiding into a dull ache, and the pulsing in my ears was waning. My vision was even a little less wobbly now.

  “Okay, so that was a lot for a beat-up old car,” Holm muttered, holding up an equally rusty-looking set of old keys. “But it’s something, at least.”

  “Well, you’re driving,” I said.

  “You better bet I am,” Holm said, eyeing my head wound again. Then, after a brief hesitation, “Are you sure about this, Marston?”

  “What do you mean, am I sure?” I asked, not catching his meaning.

  “I hate to say it, but maybe Diane’s right,” he admitted, averting his eyes from mine as he spoke. “Maybe we’re in over our heads on this one. There’s no shame in asking for help when we need it.”

  “But we don’t,” I said back, sure of myself as the words came out of my mouth. “We don’t need help, Holm, we’re fine. It’s a long drive to the other end of the island. And look, there’s some spare gas over there. I’ll rest up on the drive over, and then we’ll stick to the original plan. It’s the only way.”

  Both of our gazes drifted over to some canisters tucked in the other corner of the attic. I almost hadn’t noticed them before because they were the same color as the sleeping bag, but they were definitely gas. One of them was open, and I could see over the edge inside.

  There was a faint smell of gasoline in the air, as well, which I hadn’t noticed before, either. Yes, I thought I definitely had a concussion. But the symptoms were slowly getting better, and further treatment would have to wait until we got through this thing.

  Holm returned his gaze to me. He still looked uncertain.

  “Look, it is the only way,” I continued. “We have the perfect story sitting right in front of us. We can pretend to be these two guys from New Orleans. It’s the best way to try to sneak in, figure out what’s going on from the inside, then take them out. Or at least take the guys on the ship out. The rest will have to wait. I’ll give you that much.”

  Holm seemed at least halfway convinced by this defense. “Okay, if you think you can make it, I believe you. So let’s go get these guys.”

  “Good,” I said with a slight nod, glad to be back on the same page. I winced again at the motion. “Who do you think that guy was, anyway?”

  “Run of the mill addict, by the look of him,” Holm shrugged. “Probably wrapped up with the cartel, but too high to report for duty right now.”

  “An addict with a gun,” I sighed. “Always a great combination.”

  “You don’t think he
was on that shit, do you?” Holm asked with a nervous glance back in the direction of the main hut where the man’s body lay beneath us.

  “No way,” I said, shaking my head as I shifted the ice pack to get at a different angle of my head wound. “He wasn’t acting anything like those kids or Ricardo described, without any control over his actions, a virtual zombie. No, that was just run-of-the-mill speed or whatever.”

  “Right, that’s what I thought,” Holm said. “I just… I don’t know. I’m just kind of worried about seeing that shit in action. You don’t think it’s real, full-blown mind control, do you?”

  I laughed out loud at this. “This isn’t a horror movie, Holm, as much as it may feel like one. No, it’s nothing like that. Zombie-like maybe, but nothing like you’re imagining.”

  “Right, that’s what I thought,” Holm said again with a nervous chuckle, though I could tell he was really worried about this.

  I couldn’t blame him, really. The things I’d seen on this mission… well, suffice it to say that I never would’ve believed it a few short days ago. But then again, here I was, living it. That being said, nothing anyone had told us led me to believe the drug was anything more than the high-quality anesthetic I’d learned about back in college. Well, except for the skin-eating-itself-alive part, but that had nothing to do with zombies.

  “All right, we should get going,” I said, moving to get up again.

  The world got a bit wobblier at first, and I held my free hand against the low ceiling to steady myself.

  “You sure?” Holm asked, reaching out to help me if I needed it.

  “I’m sure,” I said, giving him a curt nod and rejecting his offer of help.

  So we packed up everything we could find in the hut that we thought would be helpful to us, including the first aid kit, some more of the ice packs, more ice that we found in the freezer, the gasoline canisters, the car keys, and some pre-packaged food that we found lying around the place.

  Then, we headed back out to the car, stepping over the dead body of the junkie in the doorway as we did so.

  It took a few tries to start, but finally, the car jolted to life.

  “Bingo,” Holm grinned, turning to me. “Alright, let’s get this show on the road.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Ethan

  On the car ride to the southernmost edge of the Haitian portion of the island, I propped up my feet and leaned my head back to rest. The car wasn’t perfect, but it had semi-functioning air conditioning, and that was all that I needed for the time being.

  Holm turned the radio on, and some Haitian station crackled in and out in the background, with voices mostly in French. It was calming, actually, to just have the background noise going on.

  And that wasn’t the only background noise. The little old car rattled and rumbled the whole way, but to our surprise, it never gave in. It got us all the way there, and we only had to stop to refill the tank twice from the canisters.

  “Well, it’s a good thing we’ve gotten this far,” Holm said, wiping his hands off on his pants after he refilled the tank for the second time and climbed back in the car where he had left me. “Because we’re going to have to find some more fuel for the way home.

  I cast him a weary glance. “We can worry about that later.”

  I pulled out another of the disposable ice packs and cracked it on my thigh before placing it over the new set of gauze on my forehead. We’d run out of the regular ice by then, as it had all long since melted.

  Finally, after passing by lengthy stretches of dirt and mountains, the ocean appeared on the horizon out of the front windshield.

  “Home sweet home,” Holm grinned, giving a low whistle.

  Sure enough, just the sight of the water was enough to make me feel calmer and more at ease. Despite the weight of the task ahead of us, at least Holm and I would be in our home territory. After our tenure as Navy SEALS together, the ocean was second nature to us.

  “I wonder why they’ve set up shop on a ship,” I mused, voicing a question I’d been wondering about throughout the day. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

  “Me neither,” Holm agreed. “Unless they’re trying to stay away from groups of people for some reason.”

  “That’s the only thing I can think of, too,” I said, staring up ahead at the ocean which was looming larger and larger by the mile. “But why? They weren’t worried about that before. What’s with the change?”

  “Just another thing on the laundry list of shit we need to figure out,” Holm said with a sigh.

  “I suppose,” I murmured. “Let’s go over it again.”

  “We’ve gone over it a million times,” Holm complained. It was true. Throughout the ride, I’d been making him repeat our plan, our names, our cover stories, and exactly what we needed to get out of this mission in order for it to be a success.

  “I know,” I said. “Just humor me one more time, okay?”

  Holm gave me an annoyed look but began again. “Alright, so our names are Daryl Williams and Clifton Beck. I’m Williams, and you’re Beck. We’re from NOLA, and we’re known drug kingpins back there. Some idiot calling himself Abel came to us trying to get us in on some Haitian scheme for a new drug. We didn’t buy it at first, but he backed up his claims with good hard cash. Then, he went AWOL, and we haven’t heard from him in days, even when he planned to check in with us. So we decided to come down and see this for ourselves, make sure he wasn’t playing us like we thought he was at first. We want to see the product for ourselves, in its place of origin.”

  “Good,” I said with a small smile, shifting in my seat to get in a more comfortable position.

  “And what are we saying happened to your face, if they ask?” Holm asked, glancing at the giant swab of gauze around my head.

  I looked in the side-view mirror to see that the bruising was moving out beyond the gauze now, and I had noticeable bags under my eyes. The bleeding had stopped, though, and the fresh gauze didn’t show much of it after I mopped myself up.

  “Fight with a low life dealer back in NOLA who turned out to be a confidential informant,” I recited. “They should see the other guy. Beat him within an inch of his life to make an example of him, and now he’s in a coma.”

  “Alright,” Holm said. “So what do we need to know? Where’s Wallace, why’d they kill him, and what’s going to happen to the product he was supposed to get now? It should be easy enough to figure those out if they believe we’re who we say we are.”

  “We promise them access to all kinds of markets back in NOLA, and expansion throughout the States on the backs of our contacts in organized crime dens throughout the country,” I continued. “That way, they have an incentive to believe us.”

  “Greed is a powerful motivator,” Holm grinned. “Especially with these types. What else?”

  “We need to know what’s in the drug, what it’s used for, and how people react to it,” I continued. “Also, if they even know themselves, why people keep dying from it at such alarming rates.”

  “How do we get them to tell us all that?” Holm asked.

  “We say we’re wary about the drug,” I said. “Though first we need to gauge whether it’s been introduced to the New Orleans market yet. We still don’t know that for sure. We can’t outright ask, since they’ll expect us to know already. We just have to get it out of them. Then we can say we’re wary about it, either because of a bad experience if it’s already been introduced, or because we know so little about it if it hasn’t.”

  “Alright, that could work,” Holm said, furrowing his brow as he considered this. “We should make that our priority from the get-go, figuring out if it’s in the States yet.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Alright, what else?”

  “We can ask them why they’re on this damn ship in the middle of nowhere, instead of in a safe base on ground in their own territory,” Holm said. “Oh, and we need a story about how we found out about the ship in the first place. What was the
plan for that again?”

  “See, this is why we go back over things,” I chuckled. “We agreed the dead junkie we just took out was our best option for that. We say we came here, but our car broke down, so we needed another one. We asked this guy for his, but he got jumpy, we took him out. But not before we got him to tell us where to find these guys.”

  “And that’s a good way to reinforce our credibility as kingpins,” Holm added. “We killed a guy just for being a little jumpy, without a care in the world.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “I think that covers it,” Holm said.

  I nodded. “I think it does… like that isn’t enough.” I chuckled again and rested my elbow on the car door, propping up my ice pack.

  “Think they’ll buy any of this shit?” Holm asked.

  “Who knows,” I muttered. This wasn’t the first time I’d gone undercover, but it was the least prepared I’d ever felt doing it.

  We continued on in silence for some time, until we were turning to drive along the coastline, the ocean right alongside us. The witch doctor’s grandson, Junior, had given us a decent idea of which direction to look. We would just have to keep driving until we saw a ship of some kind, though there would be no way to be sure it was the right one until we were there.

  Luckily, there weren’t any boats out at the moment. It didn’t look like a popular docking area, and there wasn’t a sign of civilization in sight.

  “You sure we’re headed in the right direction?” Holm asked after several minutes of this with no luck.

  “No,” I said with a hollow laugh. “But it’s the direction the kid told us to go.”

  “You feeling okay?” Holm asked, giving me another concerned look.

  “Better,” I murmured.

  It wasn’t a lie, though I was far from a hundred percent, unfortunately. But the world had stopped swimming, at least, and the pain in my head had gone from a pulsing banging sensation to a dull throb. If I had a concussion, it would have to wait. I was cognizant enough for now, though.