Age of Voodoo (41 page)

“So you’ll help me? Say you will.”

“My faithful servant, I will observe and if required will become involved. I must admit I’m curious to find out whether your bid to confront Bondye will bear fruit and, if so, what will come of it. You may, perhaps, change everythin’. Equally you may change nothin’.”

“With you by my side, I cannot fail.”

“Don’t count on me, Couleuvre. I am notoriously fickle.”

“Of course, Baron.” But Couleuvre’s voice, so awed and eager, gave the lie to his words.

M
EANWHILE,
B
UCKLER SEEMED
to be taking an unusually long time over killing Sampson. Lex realised he wasn’t hearing any of the expected noises. No splintery cracking of bones. No frantic back-of-the-throat gulping and gagging. No drumbeat of heels.

He twisted his head round, and what he saw astonished him.

The zuvembified Team Thirteen leader was surreptitiously releasing Sampson from the restraints.

Sampson looked no less startled than Lex felt. He leapt off the gurney the moment the last cuff was undone. He stared at Buckler, scowling hard.

“LT? You still in there? Jesus, you are, aren’t you?”

“Go,” said Buckler in a slow, creaky voice that sounded as though it was coming from somewhere deep and far away, some inner cavern. “Tartag. Pearce. Free.”

Sampson, in spite of everything, didn’t hesitate. An order was an order.

Buckler turned and began untying Lex.

Lex scanned the SEAL’s face. To all appearances, Buckler was no different from any of the other zuvembies. Yellowed irises. Frozen, statue-like features. Vacant expression. And yet...

“How?” Lex said.

“Don’t... know,” said Buckler, the words hissing out of him like steam. “Don’t... care.”

“You’re resisting Couleuvre’s commands.”

“Somehow... I’m still... in charge of... me. Hard. Like wading... through mud... up to my armpits.”

“But I don’t understand. How come you can do this and no one else?”

“No use... asking. Gift horse. Mouth.”

Unstrapped, Lex pounced to his feet. In Lab 1, Couleuvre was still prostrated before his loa. There were three other zuvembies in there, guarding Wilberforce and Albertine. Lex and the Thirteeners were weaponless. Still, they had to go on the offensive, no question. They at least had the element of surprise on their side.

Buckler led the charge. Lex and Sampson were close on his heels. Tartaglione remained in Lab 2, doing his best to bring Pearce round.

Finisterre was the biggest target in the room and potentially the most dangerous. Buckler barrelled straight into the loa zuvembie, knocking him off his feet. Sampson charged another of the zuvembies, while Lex took a slightly different tack. He snatched up the scalpel Couleuvre had used earlier, than dived over to the cousins and began sawing through their bonds.

A cry from Wilberforce alerted him to a zuvembie—Leroy—rushing towards him. Lex slithered around Leroy’s legs and whipped the scalpel through one of his Achilles tendons then the other. Leroy flipped forwards under his own momentum, his feet staying flat on the floor, sundered at the ankle. He fell prone and Lex scrambled onto his back and dug the scalpel through the very jazzy beach shirt he was wearing, down in between two of his thoracic vertebrae. He levered the blade around. Blood and spinal fluid spurted.

Leroy was in effect quadriplegic now, but to make sure he was fully immobilised Lex tipped a heavy workbench over onto him. Then he finished freeing his friends.

Albertine sprang up and snatched her shoulder bag from the shelf where Couleuvre had placed it.

Lex ran to help Sampson, who was in difficulties. The Thirteener had managed to ram a retort stand part-way down the gullet of the zuvembie he was fighting, but the creature, undaunted, was clawing at his face, pushing his head away with tremendous force. Two of its fingers were inside Sampson’s mouth and tearing at the corner of his lips. Its thumb was perilously close to gouging out an eye.

Lex hacked at one of its hands with the scalpel, slashing tendons. The hand went limp. Sampson, for his part, bit down on the two fingers, clamping his jaws together as hard as he could. His teeth severed the fingers at the first knuckle. He spat the tips out disgustedly and kept working with the retort stand, thrusting it even further inside the zuvembie like a plumber trying to unclog a blocked drain.

Buckler and Finisterre were going at it hammer and tongs, throwing each other back and forth across the laboratory, whaling on each other with whatever implements came to hand. Equipment crashed. Shelves were shattered. Broken glass flew. Finisterre—or was it Baron Samedi?—laughed uproariously, revelling in every second of this.

“Your soul is still your own,” Samedi said in Finisterre’s bassy tones. “Couleuvre failed to drive it down so far inside you that it was lost from sight. You must be strong in spirit. Or... is it somethin’ else?”

Buckler’s only response was to drive his fists into Finisterre’s solar plexus. The big man flew backwards as though struck by a car, but he recovered and was back in the fray in a flash.

“Yeah,” he said, clobbering Buckler with a computer keyboard. Plastic keys sprayed like handfuls of dice. “You’ve been places, haven’t you? Your soul has travelled and returned, and that’s given it strength—made it harder to shift. It was dislodged once, and it’s learned to cling like a limpet to prevent a repeat of that. You’re a lucky boy, soldier.”

“Always... thought so,” said Buckler, retaliating with an enamel kidney dish, which bent like tinfoil against Finisterre’s skull.

Finisterre kneed him in the thigh, buckling his leg. “Doesn’t make you immortal, though. I destroy this body of yours, you’re done. But you destroy the one I’m usin’, and what do I care? I’m a loa, just hitchin’ a ride. This is rented accommodation, not my own house.”

“You talk... too fucking... much.” Buckler hurled a small trolley at Finisterre. “Giving me... earache.”

Finisterre only laughed again. His exposed eye was lit up with a manic glee. “This is fun. You poundin’ me, me poundin’ you. Shame neither of us can really hurt the other.”

“Won’t... stop me from... trying.”

“That’s what I love about mortals. They don’t give up, no matter how futile it seems. They’re little sparks, burnin’ briefly yet oh-so-brightly.”

Both Lex and Sampson were still attempting to bring down the zuvembie they were grappling with. The last remaining zuvembie in the room had been prevented from reaching them by the savage fight between Buckler and Finisterre. It was stuck in a corner, unable to get past.

But now a gap appeared, and it lunged through...

...only to be confronted by Albertine, who tossed her
poudre
at it.

The zuvembie reeled and fell.

Albertine swung round and delivered another handful of
poudre
, this time at the zuvembie who was giving Lex and Sampson so much grief. It, too, fell.

A third handful went Finisterre’s way, but he shrugged it off.

“I’m a loa, Damballah’s girl!” he jeered. “You don’t drive
me
out with a few herbs and a couple of lines of fancy prayer.”

Panting hard, Lex scanned the room.

Someone was missing.

“Couleuvre,” he said. “Where the hell’s Couleuvre?”

“Bastard sneaked off,” said Wilberforce. “Used the fighting as cover and scrammed.”

“Where to?” asked Sampson.

Lex had a feeling he knew. “Where else? He’s gone for his beloved bomb, hasn’t he?”

“Then go... after him,” said Buckler, injecting as much urgency as he could into his constricted, papery voice. “I’ll... handle... this guy.”

“Oh, you will, will you?” said Finisterre.

“I’ll give it... my best fucking... shot.”

“Wilb,” said Lex. “See those two over there?” He was pointing at Tartaglione and Pearce. The former had managed to rouse the latter from unconsciousness. “Go with them. Pearce’ll need help walking. Get to
Puddle Jumper
and start her up.”

“What about you, man?”

“Duty calls.”

Lex made for the door, along with Sampson. Albertine joined them, and it didn’t even occur to either man to object or protest. The time when they had regarded her as a mere civilian noncombatant was long past.

The three of them ran along the passage, heading for Couleuvre’s dig site, where the nuclear bomb lay and where the bokor’s horde of undead slaves was at its densest and most numerous.

FORTY

THE BONDYE BOMB

A
LBERTINE’S
POUDRE
TOOK
care of the first two zuvembie guards they encountered, but her supply was almost exhausted.

“Only enough for one more,” she said.

“Then make it him,” said Lex, meaning a zuvembie Marine who was posted at the lip of the pit.

Albertine ran at the creature, ducking under his arm as he raised his gun to fire. A delicate hail of powder and a few muttered words felled him like a lumberjack’s axe.

Lex relieved the Marine of his gun. He launched himself down into the pit, skidding around the worker zuvembies. He was of no interest to them. They had been programmed for a specific purpose. Nothing else mattered.

At the bottom, Couleuvre was squeezing himself legs first into a rough-hewn hole in the concrete. It was a tight fit. His shoulders barely got through.

Lex fired, but Couleuvre vanished into the aperture at the same moment. The bullet missed by a whisker.

Lex halted at the hole.

“Couleuvre! Listen to me. You don’t have to do this. You have nothing to prove.”

Below him, dimly, he made out a chamber the size of an upended cargo container. Somewhere at the base of it were two dark silhouettes. One was moving—Couleuvre. The other was static, an object with the dimensions of a refrigerator or a coffin—the nuke.

Lex loosed off two more shots. The reports were deafening in the confines of the chamber, the muzzle flashes blinding. He had no idea if he’d hit Couleuvre.

“That isn’t God,” he shouted down. “It’s something left over from long ago that nobody wants.”

“You have just described Bondye,” Couleuvre replied. His voice sounded taut, with a pained, rasping edge to it. Had Lex winged him? Maybe even, with luck, wounded him fatally? “And what if He does not want us either? What if we are just a joke to Him? Bondye made us, then got bored, and now He just kicks us around. That is, when he can be bothered to remember us.”

“Couleuvre.” Albertine had slithered down to join Lex. “I speak with the authority of Damballah, the compassion of Erzulie Freda and the reason of Loko. As one
kanzo
initiate to another, I beg you, stop this now. Those who question Bondye’s will always come off worst.”

“I am questioning nothing, mambo. I am standing here daring Bondye to show Himself. If He is stronger than me, if He is so perfect and wonderful, He can prove it by manifesting His power. We will soon see if He really is God or just a weakling and a bully. I am not doing this for myself. Do you not see? It is on behalf of all of us, all mankind.”

Lex’s eyesight was adjusting to the gloom in the chamber. Couleuvre was bent over, fiddling with the bomb. Lex took aim, then realised that the gun was empty.

He tossed it aside. “Right, I’m going down in after him.”

“Lex, you can’t.”

Just then an array of tiny lights winked on below. Their glow illuminated a control panel with a row of switches and knobs.

“
Bien
,” said Couleuvre. “There you are. I knew it. I knew you would not back away.”

The bokor was limned by the panel lights. His face shone with sweat, avid, mad. A rivulet of blood glistened as it trickled from a wound in his arm.

“Couleuvre, it’s not too late,” said Lex. “Just think for a moment. Think it through. Mightn’t this be what Bondye wants—you calling him out so that He can swat you like a fly? What’s would be the point of it all then? You won’t have achieved anything.”

Couleuvre wasn’t listening. He was busy with the control panel, trying switches, experimenting, figuring out.