Age of Voodoo (33 page)

The pincer movement had just graduated to a triple-pronged assault.

“Fire at will,” Buckler ordered, and he and Pearce opened up. Buckler’s M-60 clattered. Pearce’s MP-5 barked. Lex joined in with his SIG. Morgenstern was still blasting away in the opposite direction with her CAR-15, a one-woman rearguard action. Albertine, Seidelmann, Sampson and Tartaglione were sandwiched in between.

The air was torn by the cacophony of gunfire. Bullets pounded into the zuvembies in torrents, but had pitifully little effect. They weren’t stopping them. They were barely even slowing them. The zuvembies slogged onward, relentlessly narrowing the gap at either end. Some of them were whittled away to rags and ribbons, but whatever unnatural force animated them refused to let them lie down. It propelled them stubbornly on. A shattered leg? The zuvembie would hop. Both legs ruined? Crawl. Even when rendered headless, the creatures were undeterred. A cockroach would have envied their imperviousness to damage.

As Buckler paused to reload, Sampson stepped up to take his place.

“I’m thinking grenade,” he said.

“And I’m thinking that’s a no-go,” said Buckler. “At this range? Passage would channel the blast as blowback. Every chance we’d frag ourselves too.”

“Then what’s the plan, boss?”

“The plan is we keep firing ’til there’s either none of them left or none of us.”

“Guess that’ll have to do.”

The group was bunched tight, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, and now the zuvembies were just a few paces away, a mere metre or so. The nearest ones sprang, hurling their bullet-ripped bodies at the living humans.

Pearce found himself grappling with the chef, fending off blows from the meat cleaver. In life, the chef had been a corpulent man. Much of his blubber had been flayed off by the volleys of bullets, but he still wobbled massively as he swung the cleaver at Pearce. His flabby arm worked like a piston, descending again and again. Pearce blocked with one arm, all the while pumping rounds from his machine pistol into the zuvembie’s belly. Viscera slithered out, but the chef neither noticed nor cared. He hacked mechanically, methodically, bit by bit wearing Pearce down, hammering away at his defences.

Finally he got through. The cleaver bit into Pearce’s shoulder, and the laconic Thirteener let out a jagged cry of pain.

The chef withdrew the cleaver and pulled back his arm to deliver a fresh blow.

Incensed, as if he couldn’t believe what the chef had just done, Pearce launched himself at him. He grabbed the cleaver and wrested it out of the zuvembie’s grasp. Then he returned the favour by whacking the chef with the cleaver seven or eight times, sinking the blade deep into the zuvembie’s ample flesh. He would have carried on until the chef was just so much chopped mince, had the janitor not attacked too. Suddenly Pearce was looking down at his own stomach and at the snapped-off broom handle that had been thrust into him to a depth of several inches.

“Sneaky,” he mumbled, then fell.

At the other side of the group, Morgenstern was swamped by zuvembies. They were too close for the carbine to be of practical use any more, so she resorted to her handgun. She shot the zuvembies in the centre of their body mass, as she’d been trained, but more in hope than expectation of a positive result. The semiauto’s clip was rapidly expended, and then the zuvembies were all over her, clawing, clutching, hauling her down.

Sampson leapt to her assistance. He wrenched zuvembies off her, to the accompaniment of some highly creative swearing. But with each zuvembie he sent flying, another rose to take its place. They swarmed in, their numbers overwhelming. Soon Sampson was as beleaguered as Morgenstern was. Lex watched him struggling valiantly to stay upright, sinking beneath a tide of ravaged limbs, contorted hands and silently impassive faces.

“Lex, oh God, it’s hopeless,” said Albertine.

“There must be something we can do. Your
vodou
. Can you use it on these things?”

“Yes, if there weren’t so many of them, if I had the time...”

Time, Lex had to admit, was the one thing they did not have. “Then we’ll just have to make do with guns,” he said.

Pearce, Sampson and Morgenstern seemed lost, as good as dead. Only Lex, Buckler, Albertine, Seidelmann and Tartaglione remained standing, and Tartaglione was in bad shape. Half his face was masked with blood, and he was weakened and on the brink of lapsing into shock. That he was still with the group at all was thanks to Sampson. As for Seidelmann, he was cowering behind Buckler, wringing his hands. “I knew it,” he intoned. “I knew we should never have come down here. It was madness. I said so. I
said
.”

“Prof,” snarled Buckler, “if you don’t shut the fuck up, so help me I’ll kill you myself.”

“Go ahead. Do it. Put me out of my misery. At least it’ll be quick.”

“Don’t tempt me. If I didn’t need every last round of ammo...”

A zuvembie broke past Buckler and made a lunge for Lex. Lex whipped his SIG up, lodged the barrel against the creature’s mouth, and gave it some radical root canal surgery.

The slide on the gun locked back. Clip empty. And the zuvembie, jaw hanging by just a few shreds of skin and tendon, clamped both hands onto Lex’s head and began twisting. Lex felt the unearthly power radiating through the thing’s cold, dank skin. Its touch was repugnant. The zuvembie was attempting to break his neck. He could hear—feel—his own vertebrae creaking. He fought back, jabbing a thumb into the creature’s eyeball; smashing its nose; tearing its ear. But those were standard defensive moves, effective against men, not monsters. They meant nothing to a zuvembie.

Eventually, in desperation, he kicked its legs out from under it. The zuvembie crashed to the floor, taking him down too. Lex contrived to land on top. The hands remained fastened in place. The zuvembie wrenched clockwise and anticlockwise. It was doing its best to decapitate him, twist his head off like a champagne cork. He tried prising its fingers away, but its grip was vicelike, unshakeable.

The blood roared in his ears. His vision blurred.

His hands found the zuvembie’s dangling jaw. He dug below, into the slippery mass of exposed meat that had been its buccal cavity. A tongue slithered over his probing fingers. He sank his nails into raw flesh and started scrabbling, burrowing, rending. He delved between muscles. He tore through sinews. He felt the elastic resistance of veins and snapped them. He was pulling the creature apart from the neck downwards, dissecting it with his bare hands. He was rummaging in the engine of its anatomy, in the hope that if he destroyed enough working parts he could shut the whole machine down.

It was a race to see which of them, Lex or the zuvembie, could annihilate the other first.

Now Lex had penetrated through to somewhere inside the zuvembie’s shoulders, behind the collarbone, and all at once he felt its hands slacken their hold a little. He must have hit some crucial seam of connective tissue. He redoubled his efforts, pulling pieces of the zuvembie up, out, sideways, filleting madly. Finally it let go. One of its arms slumped limply to the floor; then the other.

Lex recoiled, leaping away from the creature, away from the ragged mess he had made of its upper torso. He shook his hands wildly to rid them of the blood and the wet clots of flesh that clung to them. He experienced a revulsion—of himself, of the butchery he had performed—that was so visceral he nearly vomited. He wanted to scream. He had committed appalling deeds in his time, he was no innocent when it came to acts of slaughter, but this—this was a whole new level of horror.

The sound of someone shouting his name broke his trance of disgust.

Albertine.

A zuvembie had her in its clutches. The creature was snapping its teeth at her neck, hell-bent on chewing out her throat. She was managing to ward it off but her forearms were already bleeding from several bite wounds.

Lex lunged at the zuvembie, dimly registering that it was female, a lab technician, no doubt one of Seidelmann’s assistants. His fingers slotted into the corners of her mouth and he yanked backwards as though pulling on the reins of a horse. He and the zuvembie staggered together, away from Albertine, until his shoulders struck a wall.

Out of the corner of his eye he spied a fire extinguisher, mounted on a bracket. He snatched it free and clubbed the zuvembie with it. The zuvembie went down after several heavy blows, and Lex continued to slam the fire extinguisher onto her, breaking bone after bone. Arms, spine, pelvis, legs—none of her skeleton was spared. Lex shattered the creature internally, section by section. Her efforts to resist, to retaliate, grew progressively feebler and more spastic. Whenever she tried to rise, her limbs bent rubberily and would not support her. Soon all she could do was flop about and writhe uselessly like a landed eel.

Lex straightened, heaving for breath. Another zuvembie incapacitated. He searched round for the next target.

He saw Buckler overrun but bellowing defiance...

Albertine pinned between two zuvembies...

Seidelmann curled into a ball, head buried in hands, sobbing...

He knew then that it was a lost cause. There were too many of the enemy and they were too strong. The battle was almost over, the outcome decided.

A voice rang out.

“
Ça suffit
.”

It echoed down the passage, deep and clear.

As though a switch had been thrown, the zuvembies froze.

“We have made our point. They have been shown who’s boss.”

The zuvembies had become like statues. They held their poses, utterly motionless.

Threading through the tableau of the undead came a thickset man dressed in Nike high-tops, baggy tracksuit bottoms, and a weightlifter’s singlet that showed off a stocky, well-muscled torso and liberally tattooed arms. He strode like a king, assured of his domain and his authority. His hair was styled in a curly, bleached Mohawk.

Papa Couleuvre.

THIRTY-ONE

THE ERROR OF HIS WAYS

I
F
L
EX’S
SIG had been loaded, he would have planted a round in Couleuvre’s skull then and there. In the event, all he had was the fire extinguisher. He charged at the bokor, brandishing the heavy red cylinder.

With a hand that was gauntleted in gold and silver rings, Couleuvre made a casual gesture. He had arrived with an escort of two zuvembies, both of them in US Marine battledress. At his unspoken command the zuvembies moved in front of him, forming a barricade. Lex pounded one in the chest with the fire extinguisher, to little effect. The other caught him in a bear hug and felled him. The extinguisher flew from his grasp. His arms were wrenched behind him. A knee ground between his shoulderblades. He was pinned down, face crushed to the linoleum.

“Ah-ah-ah!” Couleuvre bent over him, wagging a finger. “Naughty boy. You do not get to do that. That is not how this is going to go.”

He issued an instruction to the other zuvembies. In no time, the Thirteeners, Albertine and Professor Seidelmann were up on their feet, all held fast by the creatures. Tartaglione and Pearce were both being supported rather than standing. The former was semiconscious. The latter was bent double over the broom handle that impaled him, breathing hard against the pain.

“Better,” said Couleuvre. His accent was a blend of lyrical French and syrupy Caribbean, each word delivered with a wry languidness. He struck Lex as supremely self-assured, a man who knew exactly what he was and didn’t give a shit what anyone else thought. “So what do we have here? Some more American troops, come to see what became of the lost patrol. And dear old Professor Seidelmann. How have you been keeping,
mon ami
? I knew you were hiding somewhere. If you had had any sense, you would have built yourself a raft and got off the island. At the very least you might have lit a fire on the beach, hoping to attract some passing ship. But then you are not that resourceful, eh? You know I could have found you any time, had I looked. But the truth is, I could not be bothered. You were no threat to me.”

“Deslorges,” said Seidelmann. “François. Please. Listen. I brought these people down here. It was a trick. I knew full well we’d run into some of your zuvembies and most likely you too. I laid a trap, and they fell for it.”