Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (10 page)

Then again, she
bad
turned his
zombis
back.

Interesting . . .

Well, he could prevent that, now that he knew of it. A few words added to a spell, and his slaves would be immune to any blandishments Marie could offer. She would realize this, of course, but it did not matter—she did not have the power to match his.

Boukman stood considering things.

This
was
a sign of some kind. Extracting the meaning from such signs was often tricky, but it was always there.

What did it mean?

He had, he decided, moved too early. The gods or the loa did not want him to know yet, so they had stepped in. Very well. He would back off, be patient, and wait for the right moment. The greater powers apparently wished for the
imen blan
to continue on with their quest. So be it.

Boukman feared nothing natural that walked the land, but he most among men knew better than to challenge the gods. That way lay ruination.

“Go,” he said. “Watch the white men. Stay hidden while you do. You—” He pointed at a man who in life had been a policeman in Port-au-Prince, a strong and fierce fellow. “—return tonight and report.”

There came the nods of acknowledgment.

It was a small island, but there were a score of people involved who normally were not here. He could perhaps use a little more help. “You,” he said, indicating another of the
zombis,
“go and collect the other Children of the Potion. Bring them here.”

The undead shuffled away to their tasks.

After they were gone, Boukman decided that he needed a big meal, one washed down with blood. And human blood would be best.

He felt as if he would need to be fortified. Great things were in the air, and he must be ready to deal with them.

When the Children of the Potion arrived would be plenty time enough. They still circulated blood, and any of them could spare a pint or two without any ill effects—not that it mattered. There were always more of them to be had if needed. Draining one dry would only provide a new possibility for creating another of the undead.

Yamada was ready before dawn, his excitement too much to allow him to sleep. They would have to move with care while stalking their prey, but as thick as the jungle seemed to be, staying unseen ought not to be too big a problem.

He considered the idea of bypassing the archaeologists, of collecting the native guide and questioning him directly, but decided that it was too risky. The man might know where they were going, but the two
gaijin
doubtless had more specifics. This mission was too important to risk it, and the safest course was to simply follow them to the prize and then collect the formula. Truth was, Yamada didn’t know exactly what form that prize was going to
be
in. He might not know it when he saw it; antiquities were not his field of expertise. The second man who had been chosen to offer that aspect of knowledge had yet to arrive in Haiti. The first man selected, from the Imperial Academy in Tokyo, had, in an ironic twist of fate, been on a ship traveling from Hong Kong that had been sunk by a Japanese submarine. Killed their own expert.

Ah, well. It was war. Bad things happened . . .

The American and Englishman certainly knew more about antiquities than did Yamada.

Risking failure was not in the cards he wanted to play.

Suzuki approached, looking a bit eager himself in the dim glow of the lantern.

Yamada looked at him, one eyebrow raising in question.

“I have three men in place,” Suzuki offered. “As soon as our prey starts off, one of them will come back and report. We should be able to catch up quickly, and the soldiers following will leave a trail.”

“Bread crumbs?”

Suzuki frowned. “Excuse me, Yamada-san?”

“I beg your pardon, Captain. It’s an old joke. I will tell it to you sometime.” Of course. Even though Suzuki was fairly educated for a military man, any depth in Western fantasy literature was unlikely. No reason he would know the tale of Hansel and Gretel, by the Brothers Grimm—who had undoubtedly lifted it from other sources. And being a pragmatic sort, Suzuki would be quick to notice the obvious—a trail of bread crumbs in the forest would certainly be eaten by insects or animals in a hurry, just as it had been in the fairy tale.

Suzuki nodded as if dismissing the comment. “It is likely that we shall have to stay some distance away,” he said. “And probably not wise to follow too directly on their trail, just in case they might be watching for such a thing.”

“Why would they do that? They don’t know we are here.”

“The attack at the village might be repeated,” Suzuki said. “They would be unwise to ignore that possibility. Who knows what other dangers might reside in these forests?”

“Yes, of course.” He gave Suzuki a slow nod, a military-style bow, to acknowledge his expertise. Honor always had to be served.

Suzuki returned the bow.

“First light won’t be long,” Suzuki said.

“I am ready,” Yamada said.

“Doktor,” Schäefer said.

“Kapitän.”

“My sergeant has sent one of the men back to say that they have discovered the Japanese campsite.”

“Ah, good. And . . . ?”

“They have packed their tents and are prepared to march. Though we have not seen their agents, surely they have men watching our quarry.”

“Of course. When the Englishman and American and their party depart, we must allow the Japanese to follow them first.”

“
Ja,
of course.”

“It would be best if neither group knew we were trailing them.”

Schäefer nodded. “All is in readiness, Colonel Doktor.”

“Good.”

Schäefer moved off, to unnecessarily inspect his men yet again, and Gruber turned his thoughts back to a question that had been nagging at him: Sergeant Braun’s observation about the incident at the village seemed, as Herr Wagner had said, far-fetched.

Three shots, to the heart?

Only if he had
armor
hidden under his shirt . . .

For certainly, no
medication
would make a man bulletproof. That was beyond any science that Gruber knew or could possibly believe. Perhaps some drugs indeed might raise a man’s pain threshold to such an extent that he could shrug off a wound that was non-fatal. And mayhaps even retard bleeding from such an injury—some coagulant, say, that when exposed to free air might do the trick. It would have to be something like that, else the fluid would thicken too much to circulate in the vessels.

Humans could be very fragile or very durable, but they were not invulnerable.

Of course, in the heat of a violent encounter, guns going off and in the middle of the night, Braun’s excitement must have gotten the best of him. What he had taken as fatal gunshot wounds could have, under the circumstances, easily been misconstrued. A handspan to one side would miss the heart and aorta. A small-caliber bullet could glance from a rib, doing little real damage, but appearing to be worse than it was. Some of the most minor wounds bled profusely at first but were not particularly debilitating.

As a doctor, he had seen more than a few strange things when it came to injuries. Once, a man had come to a traveling clinic complaining of a headache. Gruber had not done the initial examination and workup, one of the assistants had, but when he read the chart and saw the patient, the case had seemed unremarkable. A headache of a few days’ duration, not terrible, but annoying. No other significant medical history, according to the chart. The patient was not a drinker or a drug addict, he had no other signs or symptoms, he’d been a farmer.

When Gruber had run his hands over the man’s head, he had felt a small bump near the center of the patient’s skull, between the frontal and parietal bones, along the coronal suture. He asked about it, but the patient shrugged and said the bump had been there a long time. Years.

Suspecting a tumor, Gruber ordered up a series of Röntgenographs, even though such images of the brain were not always useful. This time, however, they were. Once the pictures were developed, he instantly saw the problem:

Somebody had driven a large nail into the man’s head, straight down from the top. Six inches long, and miraculously, it seemed, the nail had not damaged any neural tissue, but had slotted neatly between the left and right hemispheres of his brain.

Gruber had never seen anything like it. Fascinating!

Upon questioning, the man finally admitted, that yes, some years earlier, he had been possessed by a demon, and that the only way to disable the thing had been to attack it where it lived, inside his head. To this end, he had placed the point of a copper nail against his skull and hammered it in. Had to be copper to work, he explained, since steel would eventually rust from the demon’s acidic saliva. He had skewered the demon, he said, but not killed it, and so the nail had to remain in place to prevent the creature from escaping to elsewhere in his body, where it might not be so easily reached next time.

Apparently the hair and skin had grown over the nail’s head after some time, leaving only the little bump visible from without.

As incredible as this had been, the patient had explained it all in a completely matter-of-fact manner, attaching no significance to the fantastic aspects. It sounded rather like somebody relating offhandedly how he had found a weed in his garden and had pulled it up.
Ja, I had a demon in my head, so I hammered a copper nail into my skull to transfix it. Hardly remarkable, what else could I do?

Gruber had been more than a little taken aback. He had given the man some pain pills, and after checking on him the next day—the pills had done the trick, his headache was gone—he’d sent him on his way. Pulling the nail out? That might have done more harm than good. If it had been there for years, it obviously wasn’t doing all that much damage. Fiddling around inside someone’s head was seldom a good idea, given how fragile those tissues could be; besides which, the patient would not have allowed it anyhow. So there it was.

So, a bullet that should have killed a man but did not? Certainly not the most unusual thing Gruber had ever heard or seen, not even close.

Still, even in such cases as keeping pain at bay and preventing blood loss, it would be a wondrous thing, and the event had provided some evidence of this. Certainly worth the effort to attain the means by which it could be accomplished.

Well, that’s what he was here for,
nicht war
? He had a team of crack German soldiers at his command, and on an island this size they could never be all that far from the goal.

It was only a matter of time until he attained it. Then he could go home. And that in itself would be reward enough. To sit in a castle somewhere, dining and drinking with the wealthy. Even though the Führer was not particularly fond of nobility, he probably wouldn’t abolish it altogether; there were times when the idea of nobility was useful. Perhaps after the war, Gruber might be able to put a
von
in front of his name and become a baron.

Baron von Gruber—that had a nice ring to it.

No matter, no matter. As a doctor and favored by Herr Hitler, he would be a man of substance. A title was not necessary—if you had enough Reichsmarks, you could buy anything you wanted.

And you could spend them at home, like a civilized person.

TWELVE

I
NDY WAS WILLING
to take what he thought of as reasonable risks, always had been. Now and then, maybe some that, in retrospect, didn’t seem so reasonable. But, also being pragmatic when it came to keeping his hide in one relatively unbattered piece, he did ask Marie the question as they were doing final packing to head out, just after dawn.

“So, if your great-great-times-however-many-uncle’s friends come to call again and you’re taking a nap or something, how do we stop them?”

“It is difficult,” she said.

“Yeah, I kinda got that when I saw them shrugging off bullets like they were cotton balls.”

“A true
zombi
has no soul, and its body is kept motivated by magic. They feel no pain, no hunger, they do not tire. They are like automata. But for the most part, they are otherwise limited to what human bodies can do—they cannot fly, for instance, nor can they walk on water.”

“That’s the good news, I suppose.”

“Their hearts do not beat, nor do they breathe, but their brains work, after a fashion, as do their eyes and ears. Plug a
zombi’s
ears, it cannot hear. Poke out its eyes, it cannot see. Offer enough injury to its brain, and it will stop it. A hot enough fire will destroy it.”

“So you are saying—”

“If you stab it in the eyes, it will be blind. If you lop off half its head, it will collapse. Burn it to ash, it is finished. But a few bullets to the body won’t stop it.”

“Ah.”

Mac sidled over. “What was that last business? I didn’t quite catch it.”

“Marie says that if our undead friends drop by for more fun and games, we need to shoot their eyes out, chop their heads off, or broil them well done.”

Mac raised his eyebrows. “Tricky shooting, trying for the eyes. Perhaps we might wish to hone our machetes and keep a couple within reach. I don’t supposed you brought a flamethrower?”

“Left it in my other suit,” Indy said.

“Boukman cannot keep many of them animated at once,” Marie said. “Though he has more Children of the Potion he can use.”

“They bulletproof, too?”

“They are somewhat hardier than normal people, but not immune to injury in the same way, no. Hard to kill, but it can be done.”

“So our best plan is to move fast, get done, and hurry away,” Indy said. “Or go and take them all out.”

“Yes. I would vote for the former,” she said.

Indy shrugged. He liked being proactive when it was useful, but running around hunting down creatures who were hard to kill might take longer than it was worth.

Batiste, who had hired five men to go along, using up a fair amount of Mac’s gold coins to convince them it was worth the risk, came to where Indy, Marie, and Mac stood. “The first part of the hike will be the easiest,” he said. “There are a number of trails around the village, and we can use these. Perhaps half a day before we have to start finding or making other paths. And the terrain is worse the farther away we travel. The village is on the flattest part of the island; the land grows steeper, rockier, and is crisscrossed with streams, some of which are deep, as well as narrow and quite steep gorges. Some of the streams can be forded; some may require that we construct bridges. The gorges we can avoid, we will circle around; those we cannot bypass, we will have to descend and ascend with care. A distance that can be easily walked in an hour on flat ground might take ten times that long, or longer, in places.”