Nightmare Country (40 page)

“You sure this thing'll stay in the air for forty-five minutes?” Thad yelled over the clamor that reverberated around the cabin of the antique four-place Stinson.

Roger, one of the Mayan Airline pilots who thought he'd gotten a day off because of the weather, wrapped a long white scarf around his neck and threw both ends over his shoulders a la Snoopy. He studied Thad for a moment. “No.”

The Stinson was still on the ground, but the wings sort of waved in the wind that tossed the palm fronds around like salad, as if the old craft wanted to fly like a bird instead of a plane and couldn't wait to get on with it. Outside, Ralph Weicherding was trying to drag Romana Guerrero on board. Her bun had blown out into a modified bush, her peasant skirt was wrapped around her thighs, and she outweighed Ralph.

“That lady shows good sense.” Roger flicked at a gauge with the nail of a forefinger. A sticky needle moved cautiously to the right. There were a fair number of empty holes in that instrument panel, a few cut wires hanging down from behind. This was the pilot's own “recreation” plane.

Thad was half-scared and half wondering how danger could frighten him so much after the eyeball in the Metnál. He'd missed Vietnam, however narrowly, because somebody in Washington decided veterinarians were too scarce in Alaska and because Thad's name had appeared on a proposal to save wildlife in a projected refuge that had never been heard of since. Mostly, Thad treated big dogs and little cats and their winter-weary owners. He thought the eyeball had been his combat service, but it made no difference now. He'd watched his mother die, and his son, and would have expected this experience to matter less. “Hope this thing doesn't have the original engine.”

“Only fifty hours since last overhaul.” Roger flashed a set of Hollywood teeth. “Many bucks and new stuff put in this old baby.”

“How'd Weicherding talk you into this, besides money?”

“What's besides money?” Roger stuffed some padding back into the pilot's seat. “Almost everything's fixed up but the cabin.”

“It's the cabin that keeps us in here and the ‘almost' that keeps this thing in the air to Mayan Cay.”

“You got it.”

The door opened and the UPI reporter crawled into the seat behind Thad. “She won't come. And the first wise-off on that remark wins a free broken jaw.”

A crony of Roger's released the tie-downs that weren't doing much to hold the Stinson at bay, and it taxied around one of the corrugated lean-tos that served as hangars in this demented place. The nose of the plane sat up so high it filled the windshield, and the pilot had to look out the side windows to navigate. Thad stared up at the haze of whirling propeller and tried not to think about how much he wished he'd had good sense like Romana Guerrero. The Stinson picked up speed. It crabbed sideways in the wind, and he caught a glimpse of marginal runway, mercifully empty.

“Don't you have to radio for clearance or something?”

“What radio?” And pitching palms and a few houses and a choppy sea and the surface of the earth dropped out from under them. They rose in a wind-zagged course and leveled off, clearing most of the windshield of Stinson nose.

Thad turned off his stomach halfway to his throat and swiveled around to the reporter. “Didn't you say you had three kids?”

“Yeah. And a wife and a mistress and two parents and a mother-in-law. Never expected Romana to turn chickenshit like that.”

The vibration of the floor massaged tingles into Thad's feet. Mist streamed along the windshield and hid the wings. Cold air rushed through gaps where the fabric fuselage met the doors. Those gaps seemed to shift shape with every buffet, every creaking.

The Stinson seemed to hit a wall of wind, rise for a second, and then fall like an elevator with a severed cable. The motion brought back the taste of curry to Thad's tongue and the plane down below the cloud ceiling. “How're we going to find one little island in all this?”

“Good question.”

“Will you quit sounding like a grade-B movie?”

“Then stop feeding me lines.” Roger laughed at his own joke, made a gesturing sweep over the instrument panel. “Relax. Some of these work.”

They were flying no more than five hundred feet above the sea, the waves frothing below mirrored in the dingy scuds rolling across the cloud layer's underbelly. Patches of rain sheeted out the windshield vision, and Thad held his breath until things cleared.

“Weicherding tells me you were in on that big dive accident out here,” Roger shouted over the noise of the Stinson that drowned out the turbulent sounds Thad knew must be orchestrating outside. “Take my mind off our little problem and tell me about it.”

Ralph Weicherding had been unusually quiet until now. Thad had assumed this was because of the noise and the necessity to raise his voice so from his position behind them, and perhaps because he was still pissed-off at Romana. But the reporter leaned forward now and began telling of what he'd heard of the accident and pausing for Thad to fill in spaces, prodding him to fill out flat statements as if he was interviewing.

Thad was relieved to find the UPI reporter sweating and pale. Part of his energetic forelock had even lowered to stick to his forehead.

A blast of wind hit on Thad's side of the plane, and they flew sideways for a while. The clouds tumbled down to meet the water, and his eyes strained to see their path through the mist.

Instead he saw imagined shapes. Swirls that turned into monstrous prehistoric birds disintegrated as they swooped and met the Stinson. A colorless semi jackknifed to catch their fragile craft between the cab and the tilting trailer. A giant ship, top-heavy with sail and with a jutting bowsprit, leaped out of nowhere and surged toward them while Thad described the eyeball that had killed Bo Smith. His throat hurt from yelling, and he hoped the crazy pilot was in better shape than he was.

Roger had been putting them on about having no radio. He had a two-way with which he could communicate with anybody he could get close enough to. He explained Belize was one of the few areas left in the hemisphere that had no VOR beacons close enough to navigate by. “That's why we don't fly in heavy weather.” He picked up a hand mike that had dangled to the floor by its cord. “This is the Baron … on unscheduled private charter … heading for Mayan Cay. Anybody read?”

He seemed unperturbed by the lack of an answer, continued questioning Thad about the accident. Rain pelted the Stinson, as if trying to drive it into the sea. Wind switched to the front, and they seemed to fly in place.

“That eyeball thing must have been just about due west of the island,” Roger said. “I circled the British ship when she brought those oceanographers out here. That marker buoy you left is gone, by the way. Just for breaking rules, I've been altering my route to make a pass over the area.” He peered out the side window, leaned across Thad to peer out his. “But of course I could see then.”

“I hope we're not going anywhere near it this time.”

“Well … as a matter of—”

“No games now, shithead,” Weicherding yelled right behind Thad's ear. “You head a straight course for Mayan Cay, hear?”

They broke out of the clouds and were startled by pale, watery sunlight. A channel or canyon between cloud banks, with just a haze of cirrus above. White water spread out in a peculiar fanning motion from under the wall across from them, a wall seemingly vertical that rose out of sight, great humps and heaps piled one atop another, looking like a soiled avalanche sliced clean through the middle.

The Stinson turned up the canyon between clouds, and the haze above lent a haloed effect to the sun, almost disappearing over the western rim.

“You're not looking for that eyeball, I hope,” Thad said.

“Just putting off having to chop through that thing.” He nodded at the solid-looking cloud wall.

“We got to get to Mayan Cay before this storm turns ugly,” Ralph reminded him.

They banked, turned, flew back up the canyon and uncomfortably low. “There's something. See it?”

“No. Listen, Baron, the deal was—”

“What kind of reporter are you? No curiosity.”

The Stinson circled an area of sea that seemed like any other. There was nothing above the water but the foam of cresting waves. Roger took the little plane up and then dived it at the spot he insisted they see.

Something white or light-colored appeared for an instant, wavered beneath huge swells, only an outline and patches of its center visible between great lines of angry froth. Thad had an impression of an enormous domed building, but then it was gone.

“Just the way the light was shining on the water,” Ralph pronounced.

They circled again, but this time saw nothing. The Baron leveled them out, and they bumped around on invisible air ruts until he decided to turn and aim the Stinson at the cloud wall. “Looked to me like the top of an underwater astrodome.”

Thad wasn't that positive he'd seen anything more than a memory Roger was working hard to conjure. The propeller sliced into cloud, and they were alone in an opaque goo that looked like inert gray jelly but shook and hammered them until Thad could hear his teeth rattle.

“Know what they're calling this storm?” their pilot asked happily.

“You provide barf bags on this heap?” Ralph's voice vibrated with their motion, making him sound like they'd just landed on a street paved with bricks, and at breakneck speed.

“They call this one Clyde.” Roger's laugh came sharp, cut off midway, and ended in a quivering growl. “How you going to work up a decent terror by a name like Clyde? I ask you.”

Thad Alexander remembered his premonition of death in the airport in New Orleans. Ralph Weicherding began to gag in the seat behind. And then to swear and gag some more.

Roger the Baron hit the instrument panel in several places with the heel of his hand and started to frantically fiddle with things. “Now, where in hell are we?”

44

“I think it's Fred Hanley,” Russ whispered. He looked sick, disbelieving. “There were pieces of a plaid shirt and a boot and stuff like he wore. Nobody dresses like that down here.”

Tamara could think only of Adrian. It began to rain, and great broad leaves and fronds sagged even further. They gathered under protective trees, not talking, unable as yet to make any decisions. Russ and Tamara stood on either side of Agnes, each putting an arm around her. The rain washed much of the stench from the air, grew heavier, making their shelters useless, soaking into their clothes.

“What am I going to do now?” Agnes shuddered within the circle of Tamara's arm. “What am I going to do?”

Tamara had no answer for her friend, could only hug her tighter. That buzzing that had reminded Agnes of insects and Tamara of tires on far-off asphalt sounded from somewhere on the mound. And suddenly Roudan Perdomo stood above them as if he'd risen from solid earth.

He was looking at the sky, letting the rain wash over him as though to refresh himself in it, but he lowered his eyes at Russ's startled grunt. One of the other men swore.

Tamara had the weird expectation that he'd raise his arms and lightning would flash and his voice would be like thunder. That he'd invoke some god to kill them or chase them away with lightning bolts. The gloom, the rain, the violated graves. The whole creepy, sagging, dripping place. Her own intolerable pain. Roudan's uncanny materialization. All these combined to make it seem logical that something fantastic must happen. Something powerful and frightening. Even though the big black man wore sopping slacks and a silly International Harvester cap and rain streamed down his bare chest.

The separate groups moved slowly together from beneath their futile shelters to form a semicircle at the base of the mound. Tamara stood in the semicircle's center, bewildered at not remembering the steps she'd taken to get there, sensing that they should all turn and run, sure they'd made themselves a convenient target for something she didn't understand. The raindrops grew so thick they almost obscured Roudan, made him waver like the chimera shadows on the street in San Tomas on the day Backra had loved her.

“Hey, Roudan, what you doing up there?” Harry Rothnel's voice was soft with wariness. You could almost hear the “boy” on the end of the sentence. “How'd you get up there so quick?”

But it was Don who broke the half-circle, everyone standing so close they touched, and started up the mound as if determined to separate the men from the boys. The rest straggled up behind him, Tamara still expecting something outrageous, still unable to do anything but follow.

Roudan spread his arms across the mouth of a lighted hole and stared at Tamara's hair as the men tried to question him. She reached back to help Agnes up.

“Just what is going on heah?”

“There's a body down there, Perdomo.”

“Jerusha,” Tamara said.

The rain shifted from lukewarm to chilly, as if somebody upstairs had changed spigots. Lightning flashed, but Roudan just stood with outstretched arms, mesmerized by Tamara.

“Maria Elena,” he said finally, and lowered his arms as if she'd given a password and he'd answered it. “There is only a man there now, and a dog. In my dreams I can't find her at your mountain.”

“She's in a coma in a hospital. They can't wake her up.”
And I killed her plant and do you have my daughter?
But she couldn't bring herself to let loose the hope again.

“Her spirit is lost, then?” He seemed to ask this question more of himself or the rain or the rising wind than of any of the sodden people clustered around him. Red streaked the whites of his eyes, and he appeared to be near exhaustion. “I did not want her to go to that place,” he explained. “Why did you not listen to me, Maria Elena?”

Roudan pushed his way between Agnes and Tamara and walked down the hill, head bowed, fists clenched.