Luana (4 page)

All right then, he’d try something a little more overwhelming.

He dropped the scope rifle and picked up the double-barreled Blands-Axite Express. He’d won it off a wealthy Englishman in a card game of monstrous proportions five years ago at the Safari Club. The Englishman had been a good executive and a lousy poker player.

They didn’t make guns like this any more. There were no ballistics experts among the witch-men, so it must have been the gun’s sheer size that held them back. The .577 Express was wasted on anything smaller than a charging rhino.

One witch-man, less cautious or more ambitious than his brothers, raised his spear and charged Barrett. What the shell did to him cannot be adequately described in human terms. Perhaps best to say simply that the howling warrior was abruptly returned to his elements. Fragments from the shell continued past and wounded two others following behind him. The Wanderi might fight as berserkers, but they were still human. The shock of the carnage produced by the Express stopped any blind charge.

Barrett stood alone, his back to the tree. A spear had grazed his right shoulder and he was bleeding slightly. He eyed the crate containing the rest of the shells for both guns. He’d never reach it, much less have time to open it.

“Well, come on!” he bawled. “What are you waiting for? Free ticket to Hell goes to the first lucky man to step forward!”

Clearly the Wanderi were having second thoughts. The steaming remnants of the one man who’d tried to take Barrett were sufficient to stem any taste for glory. They had him completely surrounded now, but the tree was thick enough so that one could get at him from behind. Barrett tried to dig himself deeper into the wood, pressing in between a pair of warped roots.

One warrior would step forward and shake his spear or club threateningly, then another. Always their gaze returned to the smear of red on the jungle floor that had once been part of their brethren. None feared a natural death; but to have one’s body shattered such . . .

On all sides spears were lowered, and blowguns started to come up slowly, slowly.

Barrett jerked the muzzle from side to side. Wherever it focused the deadly hollow tubes were lowered. He couldn’t keep this up indefinitely, though he’d sure as hell try!

He turned right to impress one warrior who seemed particularly aggressive, and a bee stung his right shoulder. Liquid fire ran down his arm, danced a farandole on his nerves. A second bit like acid.

Blowguns rose all around the circle. As he ripped the darts out, his left leg started to crumple. The Express went off, shattering two witch-men and felling a small tree. Heat waves that rose not from the earth rippled his vision. He tried to raise the empty gun but there was no strength in his arm and his shoulder felt like soft sand. Delirium spotted his mind and he started to see and hear things.

The first was an unearthly soprano snarl, half human, half beast, the likes of which he’d never heard before. Then came an illusion, of the witch-men drawing back from him and looking around nervously.

Next, deeper, thunderous growls, like the cough of a missing dynamo. Two blurred great shapes exploded from the trees and ripped into the suddenly terrified Wanderi. A lion, it looked like, and a coal-black panther, each a giant of its kind.

One swipe of a great claw. A man’s throat disappeared. Huge jaws came together, a skull powdered like plaster. And all of it feverish death dreams, impossible. The dying dreams of wish-fulfillment. No cats grew that big.

In the middle raged a third shape, taller than any of the witch-men, clad in shards of leopard skin. It had hair and eyes as black as the panther’s coat, skin the shade of the lion’s. And its shape . . . its shape . . .

There seemed to be a knife in each hand, and whenever they moved and caught the sun, a witch-man died. The impossible sight blurred further and he slid slowly down the tree, breaking loose tiny scraps of bark, crumpling at its roots.

A witch-man was standing over him. His war club rose a thousand meters into the air, paused for eons outlined by blue sky. Abruptly the point of a spear rushed towards Barrett, protruding from the man’s solar plexus. His head went back, mouth gaped wide. He fell so close that his blood dampened the hunter’s sleeve. It was warm and comforting and stained the jungle khaki a deep, dark crimson.

Barrett rolled away from the corpse and was startled that he could still do so. He blinked and stared dimly upwards. By rights he ought to be dead, but the mischievous simian eyes that stared directly down into his belonged to no angel. Barrett would have smiled, except that the muscles in that part of his face were already paralyzed by the poison. The chimp seemed to be yelling at him and it was waving a knife taken from a fallen witch-man.

Maybe he was dead after all. If God truly had made man in his own image, what more logical than heaven should belong to the ape?

He shivered. Cold and darkness rolled over him and sounds came from great distances through thick cushions. The last thing he saw was a chrome king cobra that danced and twisted comically before his eyes. A giant spinning and flashing in a vale of mountains unknown.

Blackness.

Silence and quiet and peace.

In Death We Trust.

He sneezed.

Now, that was wrong. He grinned internally. Is there pneumonia after death? He tried to raise his head and felt he was succeeding. Then why wasn’t he bumping against his coffin? Another jerk and this time he was positive his head had gone up. He could tell from the cessation of pressure at its back. That was also wrong, very wrong.

Perhaps if he tried he could open his eyes.

Interesting. The inside of his coffin was equipped with fluorescent lighting. It also possessed a spirit. The spirit had a white coat, black face, thick glasses, and spoke with a definite Oxford accent.

“Hello, Barrett,” the spirit said. “I’m Dr. Mkristo. Paul Mkristo.” The spirit’s face split in a wide grin that was most unspiritlike. “Welcome back to the world of the living. And
gesundheit.”

Barrett sat up sharply. He was in a hospital bed, in a hospital room, and also most probably in a hospital. Since the concept of hospitals in heaven was even more illogical than his being not dead, he concluded he was alive. Moving the sheets aside he started to swing his legs to the right. Then he hesitated and looked questioningly at Mkristo. The doctor was checking one of those clipboards that doctors always seem to be checking.

“Hey,” Barrett muttered. His mouth felt like an old wig.

“Hey yourself,” Mkristo replied.

“Well, I mean, aren’t you going to tell me to take it easy?”

“No, you’re fine,” the doctor informed him. He looked up. “You can leave anytime you want. No, wait, that’s not quite true.” He put down the clipboard and moved to sit on the side of the bed. A pack of cigarettes came out of a coat pocket.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks,” said Barrett. “Bad for your health.”

“That’s funny, coming from a man with so little regard for his own.” Mkristo lit up, puffed contentedly.

Barrett hesitated, spoke uncertainly. “You said I was all right. Then why can’t I leave? Where the devil am I, anyway?”

“Yes, I did say you are all right, and you are. You can’t leave yet because there’s a question or two I’d like to ask you. And you’re in Kenyatta Memorial Hospital. Oh, and before you think to ask, it’s Wednesday.”

Wednesday. Let’s see . . . Saturday, Sunday . . . Wednesday. “The third, then?”

Mkristo smiled. “The fourteenth.”

Barrett swallowed at that. “You mean I’ve been unconscious for two and a half weeks?”

“Coma’s more like it,” corrected Mkristo, puffing away happily. “Can’t do this unless I’m locked in with a patient. Then they don’t bother me. Administration would kill me. Yes, that’s about right. I had no idea if you’d ever come out of it. Then a few hours ago you started burbling like a hog, and the duty nurse called me.”

“And if I hadn’t come out of it today?”

“Then you might have next week. Or next year. Or gotten your
gesundheit
in the next world. I wonder if you realize how much more likely the latter was? Yours is only the third case of Wanderi ‘jiji’—that’s what we’ve named their poison—that any hospital has gotten its hands on in years. The other two,” he added cheerfully, “never did wake up.”

Barrett digested this carefully. “Where are my clothes?”

“In the drawer over there. Pressed and cleaned. Probably cleaner than they’ve been since they were bought, I daresay. I also took the liberty of having your shirt as well as your shoulder sewn up.”

“Thanks,” said Barrett appreciatively. He did feel fine. Grand, in fact! Yessir, it was time to be off for a vitally needed conference, vital. He experienced only momentary dizziness when he walked to the drawer, and he had to stop and readjust himself only once, when he opened the drawer and bent over it. Then he slipped off the smooth hospital gown and started to dress.

“I didn’t know they’d developed an antidote to the Wanderi poison.”

“Now that’s one of the interesting things,” Mkristo began, looking thoughtful. “You see, we haven’t.”

Barrett paused with his shorts halfway up his legs and looked over at the doctor.

“Hold on a minute. You say you’ve got no antidote. That stuff’s supposed to be one hundred percent fatal.”

“Experience proves it,” agreed the doctor. “Nor do I think, from your state and your reactions, that you are a freak immune, either.”

“Well then, what am I doing,” asked Barrett, “calmly putting my pants on and feeling great?”

“That’s a very good question,” confessed Mkristo, suddenly staring intently at Barrett. “Suppose you tell me?” Barrett continued to dress, more slowly now, his eyes searching elsewhere.

“I . . . I can’t. I don’t remember much, and none of it very well.” He paused while slipping the T-shirt over his head, down his arms, and then continued. “I was starting to go under, and then all of a sudden like they seemed to . . . no! No, wait a minute!” he said excitedly. “I do remember! There were two big cats. A panther—black, I’m sure—and a lion, a young male.” He smiled.

“Must have been a dream, though. They were big. Much too big.”

“Of course,” agreed Mkristo quietly.

Barrett started to thread his belt through the pant’s loops. “Oh, and there was a girl, I think. Or was it an ape?” He started filling his pockets. “I honestly don’t remember well at all. One minute there’s a girl, the next a chimp, and then a giant snake, a cobra.” He paused, looked confused, and then brightened. “No, the cobra was separate, and definite.”

“Cobra?”

“Yeah . . . a giant, silver cobra, ready to strike. In a mountain valley, at twilight.”

“That’s all very, very interesting,” Mkristo said appraisingly. “Very interesting. Now let
me
tell
you
something,

“Two weeks ago you appeared at a small village near Mpala. You had two rifles strapped to your back. A poultice of roots and leaves was bound around each of your shoulders, where you’d taken the spear and the darts.”

“Yeah, I know about those darts,” Barrett grinned.

“You should. You’ve got a pair of small scars on your right shoulder that aren’t going to disappear.” Barrett pushed his shirt aside to look while Mkristo continued.

“I’d say they’re cheap at the price. The natives who found you,” and the doctor’s expression displayed an unprofessional urge to kill, “managed to lose, shred, and otherwise do away with all of the poultice working on your wounds. I could cheerfully strangle every one of them. Now we’ll never find out what it was that undoubtedly saved your life.”

“Don’t expect me to tell you,” said Barrett, buttoning a sleeve. “I don’t remember anything about any poul—” His brow wrinkled. “Mpala. They found me near Mpala? Why that’s—”

Mkristo nodded solemnly. “Quite a ways from where you and your men were reported to have entered the wild zone. Like to know how you arrived at that village?”

Barrett just stared at him. How the hell
had
he gotten that far, in his condition?

“It seems that a local farmer was tending his field, right at the edge of the forest. It’s quite primitive there, as you doubtlessly know. He turned around and suddenly found himself standing less than a meter from the biggest lion he’d ever seen. As you might expect, the poor chap simply froze on the spot.

“Well, this lion turned away from him and went back to the edge of the forest, just into the trees. Then he came back, dragging a limp shape in his jaws. Guess what that limp shape was, Barrett?”

“Me,” he mused wonderingly. “Then it
was
real. Some of it, at least.”

The doctor continued. “The lion then disappeared into the jungle. About an hour later the poor farmer pulled himself together enough to run like blazes for the village. The people found you, got in touch with the police in Mpala, and you eventually wound up here.

“By the way, you’ve got another interesting souvenir.”

“Oh?” Barrett responded, resisting the urge to feel his body for bumps and ridges.

“Feel the back of your shirt collar.”

Barrett did so. There were holes there, and lumps of loose thread. This being uninstructive, he looked questioningly at the doctor, who smiled back.

“I didn’t have them sewn up. Holes from the lion’s teeth . . . though why he didn’t put them in your neck I swear I can’t imagine.”

“Neither can I, doc.” Shrugging, he went to the door.

Mkristo jumped off the bed and looked expectantly at him. His voice was higher now, less professional, a little more human.

“Barrett, for heaven’s sake, by reason you’re a dead man! What the hell happened back there? What’s the meaning of all this nonsense about giant panthers and apes and silver cobras? And a girl? You and your case are driving half the staff here out of their minds, not to mention the Tanzanian police!”

Barrett gave him a lopsided smile. “That’s all there is to it, Mkristo. Nonsense, just nonsense.” He shrugged.

“Look, I’m alive. I learned early never to look a gift hippo in the mouth. You might get swallowed.
You
explain it.” He started down the hall. Mkristo paused in the doorway and looked after him.