Deadfall: Hunters (19 page)

He had gotten lucky. Ten minutes sooner and he would have run right into them as he came down the mountain. Instead, he had turned off to follow the nearly hidden path back to the boat and only after hiking that path a minute did he hear something behind him. He doubled back to see if it was zombies, and it turned out to be this band. He recognized them. And that was the problem. Sarah didn’t, but told me that many of the villagers did. They were men from Fort Liberte and the crazy captain of the fort. One of the men was even a former villager, a friend. He had been ‘taken’ by the captain, a prisoner. Apparently, it had been more than that.

The former villager was getting the brunt of the punishment now. They were quite pissed at him. According to Sarah, his wife was there, leading the beating. I looked beyond Sarah, and there she was, a short woman, just beating the man bloody with a hammer. No one seemed to care. I’m not sure if I did either. There was a lot more going on here than I knew, and very little of it was good.

Three days later. An assault. The village had survived and only lost four people, although about a dozen or more were still missing when the fled from the village. A few wounded and some destroyed property, most of it done by the villagers to defend themselves. Otherwise everything was ok. The fields were ok, the river wheel and the plaza well were ok. The only real damage was one completely lost and burned up tree just outside the city.

I can’t say if burning down the tree was the trick. I went through those ashes just a while ago, and I can still see the silvery dust there. Maybe the heat did something to it, changed it. I couldn’t know. One thing was for sure, that dust was clearly tied into the zombies. The undead bug came from space, so maybe the dust did as well. What was even clearer is that I had many more questions for Abraham.

He showed up again, tonight. Sarah was pissed. She came running to the house to tell me. The man had walked back into the village as if nothing had happened. She wanted answers as well, but he had just locked himself up in his house and refused to let anyone in. I walked down there too, but I didn’t make a scene. I knew there was no point.

Tague had been busy as well. The villagers had beaten the traitor to death, but Tague had convinced them to jail the other two so that he could interrogate them. He got two bits of information that added to the plot. First, they did admit to using the zombies to attack, although they didn’t have any clue how. They were just told to go fight among the zombies. When asked about their eyes and ears, you know, the bleeding, they had no answer.

But the most interesting piece of information was the last they offered. The captain of the fort, the lunatic, claimed to control the zombies. So we had Abraham, who claimed he could keep zombies away, and his brother Malachi, who claimed he could control them. We had an ancient manuscript and magical zombie dust.

What the hell was going on here?

And what did my dad know?

I had a dream last night. I was standing in front of a giant burning tree, go figure. My hands were covered in the silver dust, but when I looked at my hands, the dust started soaking into my skin until it vanished. I could feel a million bugs eating through my blood and I was trying to scream but instead, all I could do was moan and groan like a zombie. When I looked again, the tree was just a pile of ashes, and I was a zombie. Every time I tried to think, all the bugs came to life and screamed out. They floated in front of me, tiny specks of life, screaming at me. When I stopped thinking, then they were silent.

Then one of the bugs started floating closer to me. It took her shape. She was a specter, a green ghost, floating somewhere out in front of me. It was her, her hair, her face, her lips. If only I could reach out to her, and join her, I would. But my hands, they were zombie hands. There was nothing I could do. When she started calling out my name, I started crying, hot tears that burned down my face, leaving streaks of black blood.

She kept calling my name.

But it wasn’t her. It was an echo.

I woke up, standing outside. Scared the shit out of me. I had never, EVER, walked in my sleep. Waking up outside was just a tad terrifying. Far worse though, when I turned around, there he was, in some old clothing and a weird headdress made of what looked like rat and snake skins. Abraham reached down into the ashes, bringing up a handful of soot. He shifted through it, the silver dust separated easily.

Yes, I pinched myself to see if I was still sleeping.

He asked me to follow him. I have no idea what time it was, but the moon was out, almost full. More than enough to light the path for us. He took me out through a path north of the village. The path trailed through the tropical forest, winding slowly up. I followed right behind him, because even with the moon out, it was still pretty dark, especially under the trees.

I can’t say for sure how long we walked either, but it was at least till the sun was just about to rise. We reached the end of the path, and stopped on a ledge. From there, we had a clear view out towards the east and the Atlantic Ocean. It was actually quite an incredible view. Miles away we could see Fort Liberte and the bay and beyond that the white sandy beaches where the Atlantic threw its waves in a random accord. In the fort, I could spot a few tiny specks of light. The distance made it appear as if they were blinking.

Abraham sat down on a rock and took off a knapsack he had been carrying. I hadn’t even seen it up until that point. He spilled the contents out onto the ground. I half expected to see bones and snakes, but instead, there were fruits. He arranged them all in a circle, then drew a circle around the outside and the inside of the fruit circle. Stepping inside of the circle, the doctor looked east. As the sun began to rise, he got down on his knees. A ritual of some sorts?

When the sun was half way up, he stood back up. Reaching down, he took some of the fruit, took a bite of one and tossed me another. He then pointed at the rock and invited me to sit. He also handed me a bottle of water.

Without me even seeing, he had brought out a pipe and started smoking. Again, I half expected it to be some hallucinogen inducing drug, but I was pleasantly surprised by the sweet smell of tobacco. When he handed it to me, I eagerly took it. It had been a long time since I had that simple yet sweet rush of nicotine.

So, with the backdrop of the rising sun along the Atlantic Ocean, the doctor answered my questions before I was able to ask.

History refresher. Haiti’s population was based on the slave trade. For a long time, very few slaves were actually born on the island. The insanely harsh conditions on the island and the labor on the sugar plantations ensured that most slaves only lived for about five years before they died. Therefore, the colonists continuously imported more and more slaves from Africa to not only keep filling the numbers, but making those numbers grow with each and every new plantation.

Now, many European nations pried Africa for slaves, but the Portuguese were the chief among these. They had been given a dispensation by the Pope himself to run the slave trade. It was a brutal practice, with only a fraction of slaves actually surviving the trip across the ocean. I won’t go into the horrible conditions these slaves were stored in, but it was.

That was a long time ago, and this isn’t about who is to blame for that atrocity. The Portuguese weren’t the only ones to blame. Slavery, to some degree, was prevalent in Africa before they arrived. After a century or so of this destruction of human resources, the Portuguese began to dig in deeper and deeper into the African continent in order to find more slaves. Instead of doing their own expeditions, they simply paid other African tribes to do the work for them.

Deep within the Congo, at the very edge of the kingdom of Kongo at the time, was a small village next to a river. As the kingdom of Kongo expanded, its wars provided slaves for the Portuguese traders. This village was caught in those wars. Up to this time, Abraham was telling it all just like the doctor he was. The details, the history, everything was very academic. Then, the lines between academia and voodoo started getting blurred.

The chief of this village had a brother, the legend goes, who could control the dead. He was, naturally, the medicine man of the village. He used his powers when the dead died to do dangerous tasks for the village. When the village was attacked the first time, this medicine man used his powers over the dead to create an army to fight off the aggressors. The brother became the hero of the village. The chief though, was incredibly jealous of his brother. When the invaders came a second time he betrayed his brother, capturing him and sending him off into slavery in exchange for the survival of their village. The invaders took the medicine man, and then enslaved the chief and his village anyways in a third raid. Without the dead army, they were helpless against them. Both brothers were sent on a ship over the seas.

Abraham thinks that somehow, someway, he’s related to them. “I can’t be completely sure,” he said. It was a story handed down each generation by a group of runaway slaves that lived deep I the jungle of Haiti. They also have another story.

It was a story of a slave uprising on board a Portuguese ship, “A Espada,” or “The Sword.” Somewhere over the Atlantic, one hundred and twenty slaves were packed in tight in the bowels of the giant Merchantman on its way to the Caribbean. Someone deep down in that ship had an ounce of leadership and managed to release nearly half of the slaves, who then tried to take over the ship. Unfortunately, they were grossly overmatched. The rebellion was quickly put down, with blood flowing over the edge of the ship.

Before the dead could be tossed overboard though, a new uprising took place. The dead stood up and attacked every living being. The sailors would cut and shoot them, but to no avail. But the dead had no regard for the color of the skin, and many slaves perished as well. When the ship shipwrecked on the shores of Haiti, only a few slaves had survived, and those fled into the woods. Jesuit priests found the wreckage and were terrified by what they found. The dead could not be killed. So they bound these creatures and hid them away, along with the remains of the wreckage.

Abraham said, though, that the last part was a lie. They did hide the dead, but not the valuables that had survived. For the priests, that included an odd collection of scrolls with an ancient language written down on papyrus sheets. Abraham handed me one of them. I dared not open it. He said it was ok, that it was just a copy. He only had one of the original scrolls, the others were still missing.

That was what he showed my father and he thinks that my father was going after all of the scrolls.

Now that that was a revelation.

The sun had come up now, a huge ball of fire hovering just above the ocean. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Abraham seemed really sure about all of these things. I asked him how he knew all of this, and all he could reply was that it was all handed down. As far as he knew, his family had been priests for as long as anyone could remember. He was certain that his descendant had come off that doomed ship, and that is why he had the powers he had.

“Powers?”

I could only ask. Let me make this clear. Yes, zombies roam the earth. For the most part, human stories have zombies as some sort of supernatural event, but that was not my understanding here. A comet had brought something to our planet, something different. Something that had attacked us on a microscopic level. Something that had caused the zombies and destroyed most of humanity. And while I couldn’t tell you exactly how that happened, to me it made perfect scientific sense.

The dust, whatever it was, made sense to me. The fact the undead didn’t like going up mountains, well that made sense. The fact that in larger numbers, they appeared more coordinated, that made sense too. Someway, and I can’t explain it, but the fact that some certain people are somewhat immune to whatever it is that came down from the sky, that makes sense too. But powers?

He called it the voice, or the voices. He says that he can hear them. Not the people they used to be, but the spirit that inhabited them. He says that they hungered for war and for a voice, and so he tried to respond to them, by telling them to go away. It seemed to work. It is how he kept the village safe. Then he had the audacity to claim that I had this ‘power’ too. His evidence is based on the fact that somehow, his father and my father didn’t turn when they died. Not sure how that really mattered. I could be immune, or maybe not. Finding out meant me dying. I wasn’t cool with that.

Apparently, as he continued to explain his powers, he spoke to the creatures in a drug. He took out a small pouch and emptied a small portion of its contents into his palm. It was the silvery dust, just enough to cover his fingertips, as he rubbed into his palm. He said that he would then shove them into his nose and that he could then hear them. Spoken like a true junkie.

I was starting to get a little freaked out.

This guy was serious. He was snorting the silver dust to talk to the zombies.

“Do they ever call to you?” I asked.

The look he gave me threw me off. He asked why, and I explained to him my dreams. Despite the fact that he was freaking me out with all these talks about powers and talking to zombies, my stupid instinct to trust people still ran strong with the doctor.

To top it off, for all the voodoo ‘powers’ stuff, deep down, I was curious. He listened, entranced as I told him about all I had seen within my head. The voices did not speak to him, not directly. He could hear them, and tell them to go away, but never had they called him. That worried me a bit. It was still just dreams right? Abraham disagreed. According to him, dreaming was a far purer form of hallucination. That didn’t make me feel any better.

I looked at the dust on his hands. He kept rubbing it between his fingers.

“So should I use that stuff?” I asked.

He denied me his. It was limited and he didn’t have much left. So where had he gotten his? Where had anyone gotten the stuff that supposedly affected the zombies that had come from outer space? Abraham smiled and told me yet another story, this one from when he was young.

When his father had first introduced him to their legacy, he also shared with him his greatest secret: the location of the hidden dead. He used those words. His father knew where the Jesuit priests had hidden the undead that had washed up in the shipwreck. This knowledge had been handed down for generations. His father had visited this place and retrieved his own stash of the powder, but had never returned to the cave in his lifetime. He did show his son, Abraham, where it was, and instructed him to get his own supply. I asked for details, but the doctor would only say that he would tell me where it was, and the rest was up to me.

“So why don’t you go back?” I asked.

He had, just a few days ago. But something had changed. The dust changed the user, and he was not allowed back.

How cryptic. It was like an Indiana Jones movie. This was becoming far too religious and mystical for my own good. But he insisted that they would let me in. Who? The voices.

That didn’t help.

Abraham continued though. He said they would let me in and that I would get my answers from speaking to them. Again I asked who, but he wasn’t answering. He did say, though, that he would show me where it was, and if I wanted, I could go.

Honestly, I was just happy to be back in town.

I only talked to Tague about it. He was my logic man. I knew he would be able to see through the mystical bullshit. As always, he helped me clear my mind. He did point out that my father had come here for some reason, and then left. Also, the dust clearly had something to do with our enemy, and any knowledge about it, was a plus. Maybe this was the reason we had come here. After telling him about my dreams, seeing if he would react with the bullshit detector, Tague didn’t say much. What he did say though, made sense. We were fighting alien zombies, and they were as real as the air we breathed. Anything else, as weird as it might sound, could easily be just as real.

That was Tague, being real.

I’m rambling on. See, I can deal with the zombies. I can deal with surviving. It’s all straightforward. It’s in front of me. But dreams, and voices and drugs and voodoo, I get uneasy around it. I have never been a religious man. I don’t find any use for it. Quite the opposite. I find that religion has a use for man, and needs man. But Tague was right. We, well, I, took a really high risk coming here on just the words written in my dad’s journal, and here we found answers. Sort of, at least.