Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (27 page)

“Mac! This way!”

Indy put his face down and began to swim toward the opening. The rope connecting him to Mac went taut, then slackened a bit as Mac started paddling. If they could reach the shore made by the cave-in, they could climb up and out.

The drag of the backpack and his hat didn’t help. He was working hard, but not moving very fast.

Indy lifted his face from the water to breathe and saw that Marie was approaching the pile of rock and earth that projected from the tunnel wall into the river—yes, go for it!

The next time he came up for air, he saw that Marie was on the rocks, scrabbling from the water.

But the current was pulling Indy and Mac along very fast.

Indy dug in, swimming for all he was worth. For a second, he thought about jettisoning the backpack, but he would lose more time stopping to do that than he gained—

Mac couldn’t keep up. The rope went taut again, slowing Indy’s crawl stroke even more.

Marie, meanwhile, had gotten clear of the water, but had collapsed facedown on the bottom of the rubble pile. At least she wasn’t going to drown—

The water’s grip was too strong. As hard as he could paddle and kick, Indy realized that they weren’t going to reach the finger of rock and dirt that stuck out into the water—

They swept past, missing by ten feet.

Trying to swim against the current was useless. After a few seconds, he gave it up.

The river carried them away from Marie. In a few seconds they reached another bend, and she was gone.

Another bend past that, and the noise inside the stone pipe grew louder, the river narrowed, and they began to speed up.

“This can’t be good,” Indy said.

“What?”

Indy shook his head.

Mac had managed to get closer to Indy, they were almost touching, but even so he had to yell loudly for Indy to hear him.

“I think we are coming to the end of the ride!”

“Way ahead of you, pal!”

A spray, fine and misty, filled the air. Another bad sign—that meant water was probably hitting something solid hard. There weren’t any more rocks, no banks to climb onto, nothing to stop them that Indy could see.

The noise got louder. The mist thickened. The river flowed even faster—

—the ceiling ended. There was enough light to see pretty well now, and the river ahead of them—well. A hundred yards away, there
wasn’t
any river ahead of them, there was only gray sky and the whitecaps of a storm-stirred sea.

Uh-oh.

Indy looked at Mac.

“Good luck, Jonesy—”

“Yeah, you, too—”

At home in his own body, inside a low structure built to withstand the winds of a major storm, Boukman rested. He was not asleep, but he was not altogether awake, either. He was hoping for a sign. Something that would offer the proper direction for him to take.

Outside, the hurricane raged.

THIRTY

I
N THE DREAM
, Boukman heard something that he had never heard before. A voice, deep, melodious, and what it said was one word:

“Horse.”

Boukman awoke and sat up. The storm was passing—even through the walls, he could feel that the winds, though still howling, were weaker. Usually that was the way of them. The wind and rain would be fierce, and then the hurricane would pass by—a day, sometimes only a few hours, and the rain would be less, the wind dying down. Another day hence, and there might come a cloudless sky under a blazing sun, and save for the destruction and flood left behind, you would not know the storm had come at all—the sky would hold no memory of it.

Horse.
What did that mean? Was he to offer himself to a rider? Or did he need to return to one of his mounts?

He could throw the bones. Or he could smoke the magic smoke. Either might give him more clarity.

Or he could just listen to his own inner voice. Ride? Or be ridden?

Ride,
came the voice inside his head.

He took a deep breath. It would need most of the strength he had borrowed from Papa Legba to send his
âme
forth yet again. But a bokor who failed to heed his intuition usually regretted it.

Boukman gathered himself.

Indy looked around frantically for something—anything—that he might grab. Anything that he might reach with his whip—

But there was nothing—

And a moment later they were falling—

Boukman felt his
zombis
and potioned ones below him. They were in the river, floating along. He aimed himself at the strongest of the potioned risen—

—and was swimming, treading water, actually, carried along by the river. He didn’t see any reason to be here—

—and then he did.

Ahead, lying on a pile of rocks and earth to the left side of the rushing river, was a figure dressed in khaki. She was lying sprawled on her face.

Marie.

Boukman’s horse grinned for him. He didn’t see the
imen blan,
but there was Marie, waiting to be collected. If she was alive, that was good. If not, he would bring her back and use her that way. Dead or alive, she would serve.

Boukman aimed his horse at the shore.

A minute later, he climbed from the river, as did four of his other slaves, two of them True Risen, two potioned ones. The others? Well, no matter.

Marie coughed and spewed up water.

Boukman laughed. Alive and warm was much the better.

The
imen blan
would not have climbed up and left her here, and the rope around her waist with the frayed end told him the story. They had come down linked, but the rope had been severed. The men must still be in the river, heading toward the cataract at the sea, a kilometer or so away.

“Go and find the
imen blan,”
he said to the
zombis.
“Tell them I have Marie. If they want her to live, tell them to follow you. Bring them to the clearing at the sisal plantation. Go!”

Marie coughed again and managed to push herself up onto one elbow. She looked around, and saw Boukman’s horse squatting next to her. Saw the
zombis
jump back into the water.

She looked at the horse.

“Boukman.”

“In the flesh—though not my own,” he said. He laughed. “Come,
petite
Marie. We will go for a walk in the rain together, you and I. If your friends are alive, they will join us eventually.”

He saw her reach for a rock as big as her fist.

“Don’t make me hurt you, little one. I can kill you and bring you back if I need to, you know.”

She let the rock fall.

He laughed again.

Indy’s life didn’t flash before his eyes. The many times when he’d thought he was about to die, that had never happened, but the weightlessness he felt as he fell, surrounded by the falling water, seemed to last for a long time. Months, years, eons . . .

He couldn’t see much, but he opened his eyes wide. He wanted to see the rock he smashed into—

Sploosh!

Indy felt himself hit not rock, but water. He sank deep, ten or twelve feet, and stopped, then started to float upward.

The tide, apparently, was in.

As soon as he broke the surface and got a breath, he yelled, a wordless cry of victory.

A second later Mac popped up next to him, still connected by the rope. Grinning like a hyena he began to laugh.

“We bloody well made it in one piece!”

But the sea was roiling, wind and rain and river, falling into it, and they weren’t home safe yet. They started swimming aslant to the froth from the falling river, aiming for a shore that didn’t seem all that far away. Even so, it took them five minutes to make it.

The beach was more rock than sand, and not the most hospitable place in the rain and wind, with the breakers spewing foam, but it was, by God, better than drowning or being smashed on the rocks.

“This,” Indy said, when he managed to catch a breath, “is getting old, this swimming stuff.”

“I hear that,” Mac said. “I wonder if my cigarettes stayed dry?”

“The storm seems to be decreasing in intensity, don’t you think?” Gruber asked.

Yamada nodded. “Yes.” He was actually thinking about his scrolls and letters to his wife, back in the abandoned tent. Doubtlessly blown down and carried to who-knew-where by now. A shame.

“Make the going a little easier,” Gruber said.

For our quarry, too,
Yamada thought, but there was no need to say that aloud. Gruber knew. They were going around the thickest brush when they could, cutting through when they couldn’t. The scouts would find animal trails and they’d follow those until it looked as if they would go the wrong way, then they’d strike out in the woods again. It was hard travel, but they were making progress in the right general direction. It was the best they could do.

Yamada entertained a small fantasy: Someday he would come back here with his grandchildren, and they would go on a hunt for the lost tent and the treasures it held, to prove that the stories he had told them were true. That, fetched up under a fallen tree that protected it from the rain and wind and harsh sun, they would find the rotting canvas, and inside, wrapped in the oilcloth, would be his scrolls. How delighted the grandchildren would be to see them!

Yamada smiled to himself. A small fantasy, but that was all it was. The tent could have been snatched up by a tornado and shredded to bits, or blown all the way to the sea by now, to make a home for the fish a hundred fathoms down. And he would never inflict this place on his grandchildren. Maybe if it was made civilized, the trees cut down, roads laid, it would be a spot they could visit and peer at from behind the window of an automobile.
Why, Grandfather, this is not an awful jungle like you used to tell us about! It’s not so bad at all!

Ah,
he would say in his old man’s voice,
but you should have seen it fifty years ago . . .

THIRTY-ONE

I
NDY AND
M
AC
were looking for a way to climb the rotten rock of the cliff, which was an easy hundred feet almost straight up, when something made Indy turn around and look at the sea.

It was not calm. The rain had slackened, the wind was noticeably less strong, and the tide, while still sending breakers close enough to splash over their feet now and then, seemed to be ebbing.

A man was wading ashore.

Indy knew it wasn’t an ordinary man, and he reached for his revolver, unsnapping the sodden leather flap of his holster. He had the gun out and was bringing it up when the man raised one hand and held it palm-out in a
Stop!
gesture.

Mac was fishing for his own pistol. “Shoot him, Indy! My bloody gun is caught on something—!”

In French, the man called out, “Don’t!”

He was big and heavy, the speaker. Must go 250, 260 pounds, Indy figured.

Indy brought the gun up and aimed at the man’s head—

“Boukman says you must follow me.”

“Like hell I will.” He started to squeeze the trigger . . .

“He has Marie. Come to him, or she dies.”

Indy eased up on the trigger.

The rain had stopped, though water still dripped from the trees enough so it didn’t seem all that much of an improvement. The wind still gusted hard now and then, but was definitely dwindling, Gruber thought.

As they curved around a hairpin turning in the animal trail upon which they had been traveling for the last half an hour, Gruber heard several things in quick succession: a yell—in Japanese—some squealing and grunting, and two shots.

He pulled his Luger—

Next to him, Yamada drew that long sword of his and gripped the handle in both hands—

He felt the ground vibrating, heard more of the grunting, getting louder—

“Off the trail!” one of the Japanese soldiers yelled.

Yamada and his captain leaped into the brush to the right, and Gruber did the same to his left, along with his remaining man.

A moment later a herd of pigs came into view, slogging and splashing through the mud and puddles on the trail, heading in their direction. There were twelve or fifteen of them, the biggest of them waist-high and probably 150 kilograms.

The pigs thundered past, never slowing.

Once they were gone, the men worked their way out of the brush. Gruber had gotten a nasty scratch from a branch on his left arm, it was bleeding freely, but otherwise he was uninjured.

Ahead on the trail, Gruber’s outwalker was down, being attended to by the Japanese scout. Gruber and Yamada both hurried to the fallen man.

There was a pig nearby, a bristly hog heavier than a man, shot dead.

As Gruber examined the fallen soldier, the Japanese scout gave a report to Yamada. Gruber caught parts of it, but it was obvious what had happened. They had come across the herd of pigs, which had been sheltering under a toppled tree whose crown had provided respite from the weather. The ground was all trodden down and muddy, a wallow. The animals had been startled. They had charged, the men had shot, but the fallen man had been knocked down and trampled. He was barely conscious, in pain, and a quick examination revealed broken ribs, what was likely a punctured lung, and almost certainly internal bleeding. They were a long way from an operating room or anybody skilled enough to save him.

The German soldiers all carried first-aid kits, bandages, and drugs that might be necessary on a battlefield.

“Give him a morphine injection,” Gruber said to his last remaining soldier. “Four grains.”

The soldier blinked. “Four grains? But, Doctor—”

“Do as I say!”

Gruber stood and gave Yamada a quick jerk of his his head.

The two doctors moved away.

Yamada said, “He needs major surgery.”

“Yes. And he’ll be dead long before we can carry him that far.”

Yamada nodded. “Four grains, yes.”

With that much, the man’s breathing would slow and eventually stop. It would be a painless death. He would simply go to sleep and never wake up. Regrettable, but under the circumstances Gruber could see no option. Trying to carry the injured soldier would require making a litter, and the use of such a thing in the jungle where trails were narrow or nonexistent? For a man who, at best, would survive a few more hours? No.