The Phantom (6 page)

“See ya, pal,” Quill said. “Keep the truck. It’s all yours.” With that, he scooped up the skull and bailed out the door.

The Phantom glanced up; the truck careened onto the rope bridge, out of control. It would never make it across the bridge. But if he leaped out, he’d plummet into the deep gorge to the rocks below, to an instant death.

SEVEN

T
he front wheels of the truck slipped off the wood planks and the Phantom was pitched out of the cab. But he grabbed the open door again and clung to it as the truck shuddered, stalled, and stopped in the middle of the bridge.

The bridge’s ropes creaked as it swung above a deep gorge. An endless gorge. If he believed the native lore, then nothing could hurt him, even a plunge from this bridge. But the Phantom knew better. Carefully he shifted his weight and the door swung inward.

He pulled himself back inside the truck. But the shift of his weight caused it to rock, and the bridge swayed like a tree in high winds. The Phantom looked down only once, but it was enough. His head spun; he nearly puked. The stab wound in his side ached and throbbed. He was losing an alarming amount of blood, and he couldn’t think straight enough to figure out what to do.

He knew this bridge well, and he knew that it wasn’t strong enough to hold a truck for long. But how much time did he have? Seconds? Minutes?

He looked through the canvas opening in the back of the cab and was shocked to see a native kid, bound and gagged on the floor of the cargo area. The Phantom struggled toward the opening, climbed through it, and moved over to the kid.

His side shrieked as he untied the boy. The truck kept rocking, the bridge swaying, his stomach rolling. They moved to get out. The bridge wouldn’t last much longer. Already a part of him could feel its ropes fraying, giving way to the weight.

“Ghost Who Walks!” the kid gasped as the Phantom pulled out the gag. His eyes had widened with amazement, and he literally looked as if he’d seen a ghost. “You saved me.”

“Not yet, I haven’t. Who are you?”

“Zak.” He pointed to the Phantom’s wound and spoke rapidly in Bangalla.

“Sticker bush,” the Phantom said, dismissing the injury, yet sucking in his breath at a stab of pain.

A sharp crack echoed through the air; it sounded like a tree splitting in half and jerked the Phantom to full awareness. The truck jerked to one side.

“The bridge is breaking,” Zak whispered as though the softness of his voice might somehow prevent this from happening. “We need to get out of here.”

“I know.” The Phantom’s voice sounded more casual than he felt. A gnawing anxiety ripped through him. “We really should be leaving.”

The truck jerked again, followed by an outbreak of popping and snapping as ropes and vines broke apart, like the crackling of a thousand fires. It tilted to the right, balancing on the edge of the bridge. The Phantom and Zak slid feet-first to the wall. The bridge was now a huge rope swing, swaying under the weight of the truck, moaning like a creature in pain. Then it twisted and the truck flipped over as the Phantom and Zak tumbled onto the canvas roof.

The truck now seemed to hover above the abyss like a wad of spit in the wind. It was held in place by nothing more than a tangle of ropes and vines.

The Phantom quickly assessed the gravity of their situation, and it was about as bad as bad could get. The canvas roof was the only thing between them and the abyss. If they didn’t escape, it meant the kid would never see sixteen, and the Phantom’s own death would spell the end of a four hundred-year reign.

Then the truck stopped moving. The moaning ceased. Air escaped through the kid’s clenched teeth. “I think it’s okay now,” the Phantom said.

As soon as he spoke, the rotting canvas started to rip apart. The tear spread quickly, unzipping their floor, leaving a gaping hole. Zak started slipping and shrieked,
“Help me, I’m falling!”

His legs vanished through the opening, then his chest and head disappeared. The Phantom lunged for him, grabbed his hand. But the hole ripped wider, and the Phantom tumbled through the roof after him.

As the abyss rushed toward him and the wind whistled in his ears, the Phantom’s arm shot out and hooked a vine that hung several feet below the bridge. He carefully pulled Zak up onto his back. As they dangled underneath the truck and above the gorge, the Phantom reached up with his free hand and grabbed the vine. The truck shifted. The bridge squeaked and groaned.

More ropes snapped, and one whipped the Phantom’s leg. Wood planks flipped through the air, just missing their heads. The Phantom gripped the vine more tightly and tried to calm Zak, who was clinging tightly to him. “Don’t be afraid.”

Zak squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m not afraid with you here.”

You should be,
the Phantom thought. He felt blood oozing down his side, over his hip, down his leg.
Fast,
he thought. The bridge jerked twice under the weight of the truck. The remaining ropes were starting to unravel.

The Phantom saw one chance. The vine on which they were hanging was connected on one side to the wall of the gorge and on the other to the bridge. He pulled out his gun and fired. The bullet snapped the vine’s connection to the bridge, and they swung free just as the bridge broke apart. The tangle of ropes and truck and vines plunged down scarcely a second after they sailed out of its path and landed on a narrow spit of rock that was barely wide enough to stand on.

The Phantom looked down as he heard the truck smash against a dry riverbed far below.

“Ungabo!”
Zak exclaimed.

“You can say that again!”

The Phantom caught his breath, pressed a hand to his injured side. Hanging from the bridge had opened the knife wound even more. He had lost more blood than he cared to think about. His head started to spin again, black stars exploding in the corners of his eyes. He knew he was about to pass out. He dropped to his knees and leaned against the wall.

“What’s wrong, Ghost Who Walks?” Zak gave him a quizzical look as if he didn’t understand that the Phantom could feel pain or sustain an injury.

“I’m just a little tired, kid. As soon as I get my second wind, I’ll be all right.”

He wanted to close his eyes and sleep for a while, but he knew that would be a big mistake. He might never wake up. With an effort, he pulled himself to his feet. He raised his head and looked at the steep cliff rising in front of him. It was nearly vertical, a smooth wall of rock that extended at least a hundred feet to the rim. They were clear of the bridge, but they weren’t out of the abyss. Not yet.

He felt woozy and tried to focus his mind and reach into the depths of his stamina. But his knees buckled and he collapsed against the wall again.

“Ghost Who Walks, why don’t you fly out of here like they say you can do?”

“I don’t fly, Zak,” the Phantom said as he focused his wavering vision on the vine they had swung on, which hung down from the rim. In ordinary circumstances, climbing up the vine would be a snap, even with Zak on his back. But right now he wouldn’t make it up more than a few feet off the ledge.

He needed an energy boost, something that would give him the power and strength to scale the wall. There was only one thing he knew of that could provide such a jolt of power. Still on his knees, he took the skull ring on the finger of his right hand and turned the skull inward to the palm side of his hand.

The skull ring was only to be used in dire circumstances—when death was the only alternative. He took a deep breath, then exhaled as he pressed the skull to his solar plexus, closing his eyes and concentrating. Warmth suffused his body. He felt as if he were glowing.

He pulled the ring away from his chest and blinked his eyes open. The pain in his side had receded. He felt as if he’d just slept ten hours. He stood up and turned to Zak, who was watching him closely.

“Are you okay?” Zak asked.

“We’ll see soon enough. The Phantom grabbed the vine and tested its strength. “Okay, climb on my back. We’re going up.”

The Phantom looked up and imagined himself moving smoothly and easily up the wall. Then he did just that, pulling himself and Zak arm over arm along the vine, striding like a fly along the smooth wall.

“That was easy,” he said when they reached the top. Then the pain returned, and his legs began to wobble. Quickly he whistled, and a few moments later, Hero pranced out of the forest. After the surge of strength on the wall, the Phantom was barely able to mount Hero. He lifted Zak up to sit behind him, wincing at the resulting bite of pain.

“Take me home, Hero.”

Corporal Samuel Weeks pulled into the Bangalla Jungle Patrol Headquarters and slammed on the brakes. He bounded out of his patrol truck as several patrolmen hustled two prisoners from the rear compartment.

One of the prisoners, a smart-mouthed fellow named Morgan, cursed as he was led to the main building. The other one, Breen, was injured and being held up by two patrolmen. Both were
bonos,
a local term for the foreigners who hung around Zavia. Over the years, the
bonos
had turned the fishing village into a denizen of depravity, and Weeks was grateful he didn’t have to patrol the place.

Patrolling the jungle was another matter altogether. Just when you thought nothing interesting was ever going to happen, something unexpected turned up. That was the case today. A tribesman had stopped their patrol vehicle and relayed a message from deep in the jungle that looters had been seen breaking into an old burial site.

They had no trouble finding the one named Morgan. He was battered and crazed when they had arrested him and babbling about a purple giant. Some of the men thought he had jungle fever, but Weeks took his comments seriously. He asked Morgan to describe the so-called giant. All the details fit what Weeks knew, but he didn’t bother to tell Morgan.

The official policy was to ignore all reports about anything related to the Phantom, the legendary Ghost Who Walks. The theory, Weeks supposed, was that if you ignored something long enough, it eventually would disappear. But it was a theory to which Weeks didn’t subscribe.

Morgan had led them to his buddy, Breen, and they’d recovered two sacks of jewels and gold artifacts, which Weeks now slung over his shoulder. Their arrival set off a flurry of activity in the usually sedate outpost at the jungle’s edge. Weeks dropped the sacks and saluted his commander, Captain Philip Horton, who had just stepped out of the main building to see what was going on.

“What do you have here, Corporal—poachers?” Horton’s disdain was evident in his voice, in his sour expression. He was a broad-shouldered man with a thick mustache and dark bulging eyes. Weeks was thin and wiry.

“Looters, Captain. They broke into an ancient burial cave and stole some jewels.” He opened one of the bags for the captain. “Really upset some of the natives. They revere their ancestors, you know.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Weeks turned to the patrolmen. “Put them in the guardhouse.”

Morgan struggled and two other patrolmen rushed forward to subdue him. “You got a problem, Captain!” Morgan yelled. “You got a ‘thing’ out there, a big, strange-looking purple thing! On a horse . . . with a wolf!”

Horton motioned for Morgan to be taken away. “Get him out of here.”

Horton turned on his heels and walked toward a drab wooden one-story building. Weeks picked up the sacks and fell into step beside him. “That man’s been chewing on the wrong kind of jungle growth,” Horton said. “He’s out of his mind.”

“You know what he’s talking about, Captain. We both do.”

“Not now, Weeks. I’m not in the mood.” He took the sacks of jewels from the corporal. “I’ll see that these artifacts are returned to tribal authorities,” he said and walked on.

“The Ghost Who Walks,” Weeks called after him. “The Phantom.”

“It’s nonsense!”

“When you’re in the jungle long enough,
anything
is possible,” Weeks muttered.

In the two years that Weeks had spent patrolling the tribal territories, rarely a month went by without word of a sighting of the notorious purple marauder. Weeks figured that the Phantom was real enough, all right, but he wasn’t sure how much of the legend was true. As far as he was concerned, no one lived four hundred years.

He didn’t know if people could fly around outside their bodies or do all the strange things the tribal people said the Phantom could do. A lot of that was folklore, but he’d heard other things that people had actually seen.

One night when they were sharing a bottle of Bangalla blue brandy Horton had told Weeks that the Phantom had once taken out half a regiment of goons from the Sengh Brotherhood by himself. He went on to say that even though the Sengh Brotherhood was the most vicious and greedy outfit around, they had repeatedly failed to eliminate their nemesis. Since the patrol had very little success in countering the Brotherhood, Horton was pleased with the Phantom’s deeds, and that he was still around. Or so he’d said on that one occasion when he’d admitted the man existed.

But it was still a confusing matter, because he’d also heard from more than one source that the secretive Sengh Brotherhood had killed the Phantom a decade ago. Then a couple of years later, reports of sightings of the Phantom started up again. At first, they were disregarded. But over time, more and more people saw the purple specter. Horton might now call it nonsense, but as far as Weeks was concerned, the Phantom was alive and well and an asset to Weeks’s own work.

Horton reached the steps leading to the porch of his office. He paused, one foot on the first step, turned, and stroked his thick mustache.

“Look up the word ‘phantom’ in the dictionary. It means something that isn’t there. Just like this ghost of yours . . . He isn’t there. He’s something people see when they’ve got nothing better to talk about. Got it, Corporal?”

Weeks straightened his back. “Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir.”

Horton sighed deeply, shook his head, and continued up the steps.

“Captain! Captain!”

Weeks turned and saw that another patrol vehicle had just pulled in, and Sergeant Cummings was lumbering toward them, huffing, his fat jiggling. He was at least thirty pounds overweight and reminded Weeks of a bulging sack of flour with legs. He ran past Weeks and stopped at the bottom of the steps. “The bridge . . . sir . . . the bridge . . .”