by Chuck Dixon
It explained the stink of their captors.
The women were small and slender with silky black hair worn long or ratted out to create a colossal mane atop their heads. They wore only skimpy skins knotted around their hips. Some were decorated with strings of beads, animal teeth, claws and the tiny skulls of birds and rodents. Stones gleamed a dull cadmium on some of the necklaces. They wore wristlets and anklets hammered from the same material.
Gold.
The same imperfect brand of soft gold that Jimbo and the Rangers had pulled from the cave, would pull from the cave, a day’s march south and one hundred thousand years from now.
This place could be the source of the golden fertility idol, Jimbo thought. Was it possible that the skinnies had raided here and carried the idol away long ago? Or were there other settlements just like this all over the West? Some unknown early Asian migration? Or were these the original native Americans?
Whoever the hell they were, Jimbo decided he didn’t like them.
The children running alongside the procession wore no clothing at all, and they seemed to outnumber the adults three to one. Only the adult men were dyed blue. The women and children had unmarked mocha latte skin except for a few of the women who decorated their faces with lime wash and their eyes with what appeared to be black ash. The effect was primal and creepy. To Jimbo, they looked like vampire geishas.
The kids were like kids any place and any time. They laughed as they pitched handfuls of mud and fish guts at the strange men and woman arriving trussed like turkeys into their village. The adults seemed as amused at this as proud Little League parents would be at little Jason’s first time on base.
Bucky took a clod of muck in the face. He decided he’d had enough and chased the kids away with a swing of his bludgeon. They persisted, throwing mud until Bucky caught one of them with an upward swing that lifted a child, who couldn’t have been more than four, clean off the ground. The kid fell lifeless to the dirt, jaw at a sickening angle. No one took any notice other than the kids who ran away laughing. Just another day at the mall.
The procession moved on, leaving the little figure lying unmourned behind.
Bat let out a sob. Jimbo turned to see tears cutting through the filth on her face.
“Son of a bitch. Where the fuck are we?” she mouthed.
“It’s going to be okay. Lee and Chaz are still out there,” Jimbo said, walking close to her to be heard over the din around them.
“And what can they do? We’re fucked royally. Even if we were still alive when they found us.” She turned and looked at him, fury in her eyes.
He had nothing to say to that. They followed the urging of Bucky and the others closer into the shadows beneath the dome. They were going to see whoever was in charge here—the boss of the skin palace. Jimbo had a strong inkling that things would not get better from there.
As they entered the huge structure, he looked up to see that it was roofed by plates of hammered metal attached somehow to curved joists. The metal reflected the light of a blazing fire set atop a cairn of rocks at the center of the building with a shimmering sheen of buttery ambiance.
Gold.
The entire massive prehistoric palace was roofed with gold.
36
The King of the World
The powers that be were not prepared to receive visitors just yet.
The four captives were tossed into a pit at the foot of the stone cairn. It was dug to hold prisoners of the size usually captured by the blue men. It was maybe six feet deep, easily scalable by Jimbo at six foot two inches. He could see over the top of it. In a better situation, it would have been laughable.
They were left unguarded except for the company of an incredibly wrinkled old woman, who stood smacking her toothless gums and studying them through narrowed eyes. Tied as they were, they could not climb out anyway.
They moved as best they could, and each sat with their back to the wall of the pit to give their legs and spines a rest.
“Everybody holding up?” Jimbo asked.
“I could use an iced tea,” Rick croaked.
“Shit.” Bat shook her head, laughing.
“Bruce? You okay?” Jimbo asked the Macedonian seated with his head pressed back against the earthen wall.
“We are damned,” he said to no one and everyone.
“Fucked. We are fucked,” Bat put in.
“Yes. Damned and fucked.” Byrus nodded in agreement as much as the thong about his neck would allow.
“Anyone see Neeta? You think they have her?” Rick asked. His usual gruff demeanor was gone.
“I didn’t see her,” Jimbo said. “We weren’t that far behind her. If they had her they’d have brought her along with our party, right? Or she’d be in this hole with us.”
“Yeah. That makes sense. She’s still on the loose,” Rick said.
“So, we fucked up the rescue. Now it’s time to save ourselves. We need to have a plan,” Jimbo said.
“Yeah. First, let me pull the knife out of my ass, and I’ll cut us free.” The old Renzi was back.
“I have a knife,” Bat said.
The others fell silent, turning their heads to her.
Shadows fell over them from above. Bucky and Biff dropped into the pit and got the prisoners to their feet with kicks and slaps. A ladder was levered down, and they were led up to the surface again. A gang of the blue bully boys dragged and prodded them past the stone cairn toward a building constructed of pillars of stacked stone and roofed over with a tent of sewn skins. More skins hung between the columns hiding the interior in shadow.
Piled unceremoniously to one side of the hut was their gear. The packs, drone case, ammo, and weapons had been dropped there as trophies or offerings. Enough firepower to ruin the day of every fucker in this parish just out of reach. The Rangers looked at them longingly.
Blue smoke rose lazily from an opening in the tent roof. Jimbo sniffed then shifted his gaze to meet Rick’s eyes. Renzi shrugged.
The sickly-sweet herbal aroma of marijuana rose thick as fog through the rooftop.
A flat tinkle like a wind chime reached them from within. The indigo men all around them dropped to their knees at the sound. Jimbo felt a club strike the back of his legs and he dropped to his knees as well. Bat and the other two captives did the same. Bucky and Biff and their pals touched their foreheads to the ground. Jimbo kept his back straight. The ligature about his neck didn’t allow for prostrating himself.
The first to emerge from the opening to the house within a house was the same wrinkly old woman who had been so keenly interested in them earlier. She came swaying into view, tits down to her crotch and giggling. The old bitch was high as bejesus on whatever they were huffing in the stone hut. She shook a curved coup stick hung with hundreds of tiny fish bones. The source of the tinkling sound. The ancient woman stumbled to a stop and unceremoniously dropped to take seat on the dirt, where she dozed off instantly.
Next to come out of the hut were four indigo men carrying a bier on their shoulders with a seated figure atop it. They walked with a slow and solemn stride toward where the captives knelt. A reedy command from atop the bier and they lowered their burden to the ground with a practiced gentility. This was all part of some deep ritual.
They weren’t just in the presence of the leader of the blue men, Jimbo realized. The Rangers and Bat and Byrus were about to meet their gods.
Seated on the bier, now at eye level with the captives, was a pathetic creature made all the more so by a crown of colorful feathers and gold beading that adorned his head. It was a man of indeterminate age who was afflicted with a variety of congenital defects. His chest was sunken above a grotesquely swollen belly. His right arm was a spindly thing more bone than flesh. His left was withered and ended just below the elbow in a twisted three-fingered claw. All this made his head seem outsized. Large wet eyes gleamed with the burnished iron reflection of severe cataracts. His mouth hung open, revealing blackened teeth widely spaced, a
nd a tongue that flickered over his lips like a reptile’s. His afflictions continued below his waist to an undeveloped pelvis and legs that were withered and bent.
This creature regarded them with near-blind eyes. A snot-encrusted nose sniffed wetly at them.
“Who’s the retard?” Rick said.
The broken man-child tilted its head slightly at this sound and closed its mouth with a snap. It mewled softly in a hoarse whisper. Bucky, head pressed to the dirt, answered with a quavering voice. He was scared shitless by this sad cripple. They had an exchange. The thing on the bier speaking and Bucky answering. Whatever was being said here would determine their fate, Jimbo realized. This was a reckoning, and they were the topic of the day. It was for damned certain they wouldn’t like the outcome no matter what was decided. He thought of the headless skeletons lining the rampart walls.
The thing on the bier raised its one good hand in the air and chittered away in the high falsetto they’d heard earlier. Bucky and his gang groveled lower, knees shifting, asses up and bellies on the ground. The carriers lifted their burden once again and backed away into the shadows of the smoke-filled hut. On the return trip, the creature on the bier raised a plaintive cry that sounded like a single word. At this, the wrinkled crone stirred, rose to her feet, and followed the procession into the hut.
Once the chief, shaman or chairman of the board was out of sight, a dry rattle of bones sounded from within. That was the signal for Bucky, Biff, and the rest of the thugs that the audience was ended. They leapt to their feet to roughly drag their prisoners back away from the skin palace and past the holding pit. Standing deeper in the shadows of the golden rooftop was a stout cage of crossed birch poles tied in place by bundled thongs. A gate was swung open, and the four captives were shoved inside. The gate was then closed and secured with a length of knotted straps. Bucky and the others departed, leaving only Biff behind as guard.
The cage was about the size of a double-wide trailer home. Obviously constructed to hold many more captives. The floor was a raised platform of interlaced bamboo shafts and crusted with feces from previous occupants. The stench of shit and piss was overpowering. The floor was a shifting black carpet of millions of flies suspended over a cesspit.
There were twenty or more occupants already enclosed inside. A huddle of men and women and a couple of kids gathered back in the far corner. They looked up at the newcomers with little interest. There was an empty, vacant look in their eyes. These were the eyes of people in shock, who’d seen pure horror and deep loss and were broken by it.
Jimbo had seen that look before. In the faces of villagers in the Helmond after the Taliban had been through. In Haditha and Tikrit in the wake of Al Qaeda occupations.
Their fellow captives had jet-black hair and olive skin. “They’re from Neeta’s village. This is what’s left of them,” Jimbo said.
“Your in-laws, Renzi,” Bat said.
“Fuck them. What about us?” Rick said.
“The little lady tells us where her knife is hidden, and we go get our guns back,” Jimbo said.
37
Brothers in the Woods
“Can you talk to us, Neeta? Tell us where Ricky is? Ricky?” Lee said.
N’itha recovered with the help of some sips of water and a cool cloth on her forehead. She looked like hell. Muddy as a drowned rat with bleeding cuts to her arms and legs where she had run through miles of brambles to catch up with them.
She could sure talk. Only she was as little help conscious as she had been in a faint. The language problem was an insurmountable barrier. Whatever way she had of communicating with Rick Renzi was intuitive and relied a lot on their year of closely shared company. To the pair of Rangers, it was just a bunch of hand-waving and babble spiced with a few choice Renzi-isms.
“Big shit! Biiiig shit! Men! Holy fuck! Men!” she shouted and pulled at them before falling back into the rapid-fire gibberish of what passed for her language.
“Slow down, Neeta. What men? Some men took Rick?” Chaz gently touched her arm.
“Rikki! Gone! Men!” N’itha slapped Chaz’s hand. He withdrew it, but she grabbed his wrist and stroked the back of his hand with her fingers.
“Men! Men! Men!” she said, touching his hand as she repeated it.
“Men? Like me? Black men?”
She nodded her head with enthusiasm.
“Damn. There’s brothers here? Black men?” Chaz said, astonished.
She nodded, pulling on his wrist and pointing north along the trail they were following in pursuit of their friends. All the jabber was riling up the skinnies who kept running down the trail and back, urging the Rangers on with hoots and grunts. Whether or not they understood N’itha was an open question. But they surely picked something up from her tone.
“She saw something anyway,” Lee said.
“No shit. But it doesn’t do us much good if we can’t understand her.” Chaz brushed away Homer, who was anxiously pawing at his arm.
“They understand her somehow.” Lee nodded at the agitated skinnies, who were acting like penned hounds with the scent of the fox in their snouts.
“Great. We can’t talk to them either.”
Lee offered N’itha the hose of his CamelBak once more. She drank deeply then took the protein bar he offered. She took one bite and ran off north down the trail with the skinnies following on her six, eating as she ran.
“We gonna let a beat-up, barefoot girl beat us to the fight?” Chaz said and took off after her.
“Fuck,” Lee snarled and gave chase.
It was late afternoon by the time they reached the foot of the causeway. Chaz had to take N’itha around the waist and lift her bodily off the ground to keep her from haring off across the causeway and taking their platoon of skinnies with her.
“Slow down, girl. You have guts. Now we use our brains and Ranger logic,” he said in her ear as soothing as he could. Chaz used the same voice he used when he was a kid to calm the milk cows back on Uncle Red’s farm. It worked. She was still humming with a desire to bolt but seemed to grasp his cautioning tone.
The Rangers urged the skinnies into concealment in the tall reeds and gestured for the agitated man-eaters to stay quiet by holding their hands over their mouths. The boggy apron of the causeway was covered in fresh human tracks. Some booted. A pair of size thirteens another size eleven and the smaller imprint of Bat’s boots and Byrus’ sneakers. They were alive when they passed this point not that long ago. All the other prints told them this place was heavily trafficked by whoever it was who took their friends.
The skinnies complied and squatted down out of sight below the tops of the razor grass and cattails at the edge of the marsh. Most of them curled up and fell asleep, heaped together like house cats all around the big .50 caliber they’d humped all this way. N’itha argued with Chaz in an urgent whisper but finally sat down and was soon asleep, legs crossed and head drooped forward.
“You keep watch here,” Lee said. “I’m going to find some high ground.” He made his way through the rushes for a collection of rocks visible above them along the tree line. It formed a level knob with a view of the marsh and the causeway surface.
Chaz munched a HOOAH! bar washed down with filtered water mixed with an instant coffee packet. The cold joe was nasty, but he needed to stay awake. After nearly twelve hours of pushing hard and only a couple hours’ sleep before that, he was beat. If he lowered his head for a second, he’d be gone as fast as the skinnies snoring away all around him. Only Homer was awake, sucking on a Marlboro, eyes half-lidded and bloodshot.
Lee lay atop the rise and read the land.
The half-mile long causeway was God’s own chokepoint, the only way to their target other than humping around the marsh that surrounded the lake. And there was no assurance that there was a way to the settlement around the other side. On a sweep of the lakeshore with the 30x, he spotted a splash of white water and spreading ripples. Further study revealed a wide muddy slide free of vegetation.
A sure sign of crocs or gators. As he watched, he saw subtle movement on the shore. What he thought was a hummock of mud at first, with a focus adjustment, revealed itself to be a long crocodilian of some species separating itself from a pile of maybe a dozen other gators slumbering in the sunlight. Further study showed him even more scaly horrors lying slathered in muck along the water’s edge.
He turned the glass back to the settlement. The post-and-wicker fence wall was pure cheeseball. He could probably kick down a section with his boots. What lay beyond was more troubling. Columns of smoke rose from cook fires among the rooftops packed cheek by jowl inside the fence line. Lots of columns. Lots of cook fires. When the wind shifted, he could smell the fish frying even over the rich funk of the swamp. There were no canoes pulled up on the shore. These weren’t water-going folks. Couldn’t blame them, with a lake full of gators on the shores and God alone knew what else below the surface.
Wading the marsh might have been a quick and dirty way in and out but for those seen and unseen dangers. Scaling the sleeping monsters, he saw to the length of the cattails near them; they were easily twenty footers or more. He’d been a lot closer to this kind of bastards on an op in Sarawak than he ever cared to be. They owned the waters here, and he’d let them have them.
The village sat near the foot of a range of tall red cliffs. Beautiful high ground but on the wrong side of the target zone for him. And humping to the peak would take days. Lee didn’t think Bat, Jimbo, and the others had that kind of time. If the Rangers and company were going to be pulled out of there, it would have to be tonight while they were hopefully still alive and all together in one place.