Age of Voodoo (39 page)

Couleuvre was poised to give his zuvembie assassin the kill command. Abruptly, he raised his head. He turned this way and that, questing, quizzical. Something had caught his attention. Some sound?

A broad smile buttered its way across his features.

“They have found it,” he exclaimed. “They have breached through. Bondye stands revealed. Bondye in all his glory.”

Without another word he hurried out of the laboratory, leaving several stationary zuvembies, including the two recent additions to their ranks, along with a perplexed Wilberforce and a relieved Albertine.

The two cousins had been granted a reprieve.

But for how long?

L
EX LAY BACK
on the gurney, numb with despair. Events in Lab 1 had cast a pall over the people in Lab 2. The atmosphere, already grim, now verged on desolate. Nobody met anyone else’s eye. Nobody seemed to want to speak.

“Man’s got his bomb,” Sampson finally said. “I guess it really is game over.”

“It may not work,” said Buckler. “Jeez, how long’s the damn thing been sitting there? Thirty years? Wires and contacts could be corroded. The trigger mechanism could have seized up. The plutonium core’s probably decayed beyond viability. Odds are it’ll go off with a fizzle and a fart instead of an almighty bang.”

“You think, LT?” said Tartaglione.

“I don’t know. I’m trying to look on the bright side. It’s what I do.”

“Yeah, chief,” said Sampson, “you’re always a regular ray of sunshine. Famous for it. All the bars we hang out at, the guys all say, ‘You know that Tom Buckler? He’s just one big bottle of happy juice, he is.’”

“Damn straight,” said Buckler. “But I’ve got to tell you, all of you...”

“Hell no, please don’t get schmaltzy on us.”

“Not intending to, Tartag. All’s I was going to say was, don’t be afraid.”

“Kind of late for that, don’t you reckon? I think I already peed myself a little tiny bit.”

“I mean of dying. Because I believe—no, I know—there’s something on the other side. There’s more.”

“You know?” said Lex.

“Sure I do. I’ve been there.”

Lex recalled a conversation he had had earlier in the day. “Sarajevo.”

“Who told you?”

It wasn’t betraying a confidence. She was dead, after all. “Morgenstern. She said something happened to you a few years back, in Sarajevo.”

“Something did,” said Buckler.

“But you prefer not to talk about it.”

“I do. But I guess, in the situation we’re in, it might be, I don’t know, instructive?”

“Go on, then. If it’ll help.”

“You really want to hear it?”

Lex did his best to shrug. “Why not? Isn’t as if I’ve got much else to do at present—apart from wait to die.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

SARAJEVO

T
EAM
T
HIRTEEN FLEW
into Butmir International Airport on a freezing, fogbound winter morning. This was about five years ago, maybe nearer six. Heading up the squad was Master Chief Eugene Exton, an ROTC graduate who had racked up hundreds of hours of mission time in some of the hairiest combat zones on the planet. A stand-up guy who took shit from no one and gave you shit only if you deserved it.

Buckler was the junior member of the team, the FNG—Fucking New Guy—having been a Thirteener for just three months. The very first operation he’d gone on had involved a nest of vampires, and that had been a goddamn eye-opener all right. Baptism by fire. He was still finding his feet in the crazy, fucked-up, Stephen-King-meets-James-Bond world of Team Thirteen.

Their objective was an industrial park in Sarajevo’s Novi Grad municipality, specifically a warehouse unit that had been turned into a nightclub. A decade after peace had come to post-Yugoslavia, the kids were dancing again, deafening themselves with dubstep or techno or some other such moron music while necking down the kind of pharmaceuticals that made that type of racket bearable.

Only, at this particular venue the happy vibes had turned to screams one night. The warehouse had become a slaughterhouse.

Casualties had topped a hundred and fifty. The survivors, few that they were, claimed to have seen ghosts whisking through the crowd of ravers, slitting throats, gutting bellies, ripping out hearts and spines.

The Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities publicly dismissed these accounts as nonsense. A bunch of kids off their faces, tripping balls on ketamine and ecstasy? Amid lasers and flashing lights and clouds of dry ice? Of course they hadn’t seen ghosts. The official line was that gangsters, Russian mafia most likely, had rampaged through the place with machetes and samurai swords, settling some grudge or debt they had with the nightclub’s owners.

The unofficial line was somewhat different. Somebody somewhere in the national government knew there was more to the incident than met the eye and knew, too, about Team Thirteen. Calls were made, and while, on the face of it, it wasn’t an American problem, there had been American boots on the ground during the Balkan crisis, so the US had some sort of moral obligation in the region. It was, it seemed, a kind of legacy issue.

Because, see, in that selfsame warehouse, back in 1995, there was a massacre of Bosniaks—Bosnian Muslims. On the orders of General Ratko Mladić a couple of hundred of them had been rounded up by the Serbian paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions, marched into the warehouse, and scythed down by machinegun fire. UN peacekeepers had found the bodies the next morning, led to them by an informant.

And now the very pissed-off spirits of these victims were back and had exacted bloody vengeance on a bunch of civilians no less innocent and undeserving than they themselves had been.

After the incident, a Catholic priest went in to bless the nightclub and cleanse it with holy water. He was torn to pieces by unseen forces.

An imam tried to do much the same, and wound up just as dead.

Now it was Team Thirteen’s turn, and Master Chief Exton led the squad into the cavernous building with a plan to, in his words, “lay some motherfucking ghosts with extreme prejudice”.

The ghosts attacked, but Team Thirteen were armed with guns loaded with special ammo—fragmentation rounds containing a bead of iron-mercury suspension at their core. That shit was like hydrochloric acid to spooks and spectres. Fucked them up big time. And as if that wasn’t enough, the Thirteeners had EMP-burst projectors that played havoc with the electrical fields that ghosts used to manifest themselves tangibly. The ghosts needed to adopt solid forms in order to cause physical harm. An EMP-burst projector disrupted them, like throwing a stone into a pond. It dispersed them into ineffectual ripples.

Trouble was, these ghosts were an unusually strong variety. Master Chief Exton was startled by how much telluric energy they were sucking up from their surroundings. They were taking hits but kept on coming. And there were so many of them, so goddamn many.

What Exton didn’t realise—what no one realised until later—was that the warehouse was sited on a Thin Patch. That was the name for places where the membrane between the earthly realm and others was, well, thin. Thinner than normal. Porous, even. Shit from other worlds and dimensions could leak through at a Thin Patch, and the other way round. The Bosniak ghosts were being fuelled by power from elsewhere, serious netherworldly power, demonic power. Something on the other side of the Thin Patch was giving them extra juice, meaning the Thirteeners’ dedicated weaponry was not having the impact it ought to.

Put simply, the squad were getting their asses handed to them.

Master Chief Exton sounded the retreat. Team Thirteen made for the main entrance, only to find the door shut fast, sealed by the ghosts, unbudgeable. Great big steel thing. Even a grenade couldn’t make a dent.

Trapped. But Exton kept a cool head. The ghosts were swarming around, ragged phantom shapes swooping from the roof beams, hurtling past the DJ’s station and the bar and the dance floor. Gaping jagged mouths. Outstretched ectoplasmic talons. A fucking nightmare. But Exton kept the orders coming: “Enfilading fire. Watch your six. Cover the man next to you. Maintain pressure on these sons of bitches. They can’t keep going forever.”

Unfortunately it felt as though they could.

Team Thirteen started taking casualties. One man down. Then two more.

Buckler couldn’t remember much about what happened next. His last sight of Exton was the master chief with a dozen ghosts swirling around him in an angry opalescent blizzard, slashing and rending. Exton went down with guns blazing.

Buckler was aware that he was the last team member standing. Then everything seemed to melt and crumble. Reality shifted.

It appeared that, with Exton’s death, some kind of quota had been met. The Bosniak ghosts had caused the requisite number of fatalities. The crimes against them had been cosmically cancelled out. What was owed had been repaid, corpse for corpse. The force that powered them was now summoning them back. The ghosts were sucked through some kind of portal, spinning in a downward spiral as though caught in an eldritch Coriolis effect.

Buckler was pulled along with them. He was ensnared in their slipstream. He struggled but couldn’t fight it. He clung to anything he could, but the vortex was as irresistible as a whirlpool at sea. He went flailing through the Thin Patch. It felt, weirdly, like passing through a layer of cold, damp silk.

What lay beyond?

Hell.

Rocks. Boiling lakes. Streams of lava. Some of the foulest, most grotesque demons the mind could conjure up. Everywhere, the sounds of torment and agony, resounding up to a sky that looked like a stormy sunset. The stench of sulphur and barbecued meat. It was just how Buckler used to picture hell during religious instruction classes at grade school, particularly the ones with Mrs Flinders presiding, a pinch-faced old biddy who seemed to exult in the Old Testament tales of revenge and suffering and the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic scourges.

Maybe Buckler’s own imaginings and prejudices created this version of hell. Maybe it conformed to what he expected he was going to find. Maybe hell would appear different to different people. Maybe hell was personally designed, tailor-made for each of us.

Anyway, Buckler took one moment to panic, then segued straight into evade-and-survive mode. He was a Navy SEAL, goddamit. A SEAL stuck behind enemy lines. Wherever he might be, however hostile the terrain and the natives, he had the training to cope. Even in hell itself.

He kept on the go. He steered well clear of the horned, hooved, batwinged demons whenever they were on the march. He found high ground from which to observe the lie of the land and plot his next move. He stayed safe and alive.

He had no idea how long he scurried and skulked in that place. There was no night and day. The sky remained perpetually the same, always orange and brown, seething and boiling. His watch did not work. His circadian rhythm was shot to pieces. Oddly enough, he did not feel hunger or thirst. He seemed to be in a kind of stasis, one long continuum of now. He slept occasionally—catnapped, more like—but never really felt tired. He would just stop for a bit, hole up, rest, close his eyes, then wake up and carry on. Time was obviously passing, but passing in no way he had ever known or could fathom.

Often he came close to being discovered and caught. The demons had sensitive noses. They would scent him, and form packs, and hunt him, and he would flee and just somehow managed to outrun them or hide from them.

And then there were the souls he saw, naked human figures being subjected to the worst kinds of old-school torture: torn, maimed, mutilated, eviscerated, stretched, racked, broken, burned, pierced, impaled, flayed. Punished for wrongs they had committed while alive. Raped and sodomised and brutalised and humiliated in a constant orgy of retribution and purgatorial justice.

Vaguely he hoped to find a way out, an exit, perhaps another Thin Patch he could force himself through. That was the objective that kept Buckler going when all he really wanted to do was collapse and curl up into a ball, howling in madness and despair. He vowed to break free. He would escape hell. He shouldn’t be here. He had fallen in by mistake. Surely, under the circumstances, there ought to be a loophole that allowed accidental visitors like him to leave.