The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (21 page)

“
Tou mouri
.”

The people murmured. Lundi held up his hand. The people fell silent again. They listened to his words.

To Crispin, he said, “This goat. This goat he like you. He want you. We give you to him. We hold you and he fuck you. He fuck you till you die, fat boy.”

Lundi moved over to Asia. She had been stripped naked and draped with dirty shrouds from a freshly exhumed coffin, rank and unspeakable with the seeping secretions of death. Her eyes were staring, wild and desperate, as if her very eyes themselves were in pain, or as if she had slipped through the ether into the realm of madness. Lundi took the snake by the neck. He pointed it at her face. The snake flicked out its tongue and licked her eyeball. She could not move it or avert it. Lundi reached down and brusquely parted her labia. He took the snake from around his neck and pushed its head against her vagina. The people moaned in unison, a low, guttural, sad sound of longing and despair. Lundi silenced them again with an imperious motion of his hand.

“
Tou mouri.
This snake.
Iwa damballah wedo.
This snake he like you. He want you. We give you to him. He crawl inside you. Deep inside you belly. Inside you womb. And then he eat you. From inside out, eat you till he crawl out you mouth. But first.”

Lundi forced himself into Asia’s mouth and began to thrust himself in and out. At the same time he motioned, and four powerful men came forward. They lifted Crispin and threw him to the dirt. One grabbed him and roughly rolled him over. The other took hold of the goat’s member and began to arouse it.

The people began to clap their hands and the moaning began again, rhythmic and musical. “Mmmmhhhmmm, aaaayaaaah.
Obasiley jango loiro
, mmmmhhhmmm, aaaayaaaah.
Obasiley jango loiro
.”

Mercifully for Crispin, he was gone. His mind had refused to accept the appalling reality of what was happening to him and had transported him to a coma-like state where he was aware of nothing other than as a dispassionate observer to his own suffering. He was idly thinking about a toy he had when he was a little boy. It had a little model of Dorothy and Toto. It had a key. When you turned the key, Dorothy sang “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” and danced in a circle, and Toto jumped up and down in time to the music.

Asia was feeling everything. Her mind was about to snap. It could not comprehend that such obscenities could happen, and she felt such a fear as she had not imagined could exist, but also such a blazing fury, and outrage that her mind would not succumb to its own desire to escape into lunacy.

Lord Lundi was close to coming. He raised his hands above his head in supplication to the dark swamp demons that inhabited his fevered mind, and opened his mouth to give vent to his lust.

A Remington Golden Saber 125gr round took out his two front teeth, passed through the back of his neck, and took out the back of the skull of the man who was manipulating the goat. Lundi was ejaculating as he fell. The startled snake whipped down and bit him on the end of his cock. Baby Joe’s second shot drilled the other goatherd just below his left eye socket. Blood and vitreous humor splattered onto Crispin’s butt cheek.

The congregation dissolved into hysteria. People began screaming and shouting, pushing each other, tipping and falling, running blindly, dispersing into the swamp. Baby Joe emptied the piece into the mob, speed loaded, and dropped two men who were attempting to climb into a canoe. A man loomed out of the darkness wielding a machete. The blade flashed in the firelight. Baby Joe parried the blow and smashed the man’s wrist with the gun, but the tip of the blade opened up his cheek. He put three slugs into the man’s sternum and backed against a tree. He listened to the people splashing as they scrambled through the swamp, and the echoes of the gunfire. The noise gradually diminished as the people gained distance and the dripping, sultry swamp closed in to devour the sound.

Only Lord Lundi still moved. He wanted to scream, but Baby Joe’s shot had taken out his vocal chords. Only a strangled bloody gurgle came out of his mouth. The snake still had its teeth embedded in his penis. Baby Joe took the machete and stood over him. He raised the blade, and then stopped, and lowered it again.

Baby Joe left him. He walked over to Asia and knelt beside her. He looked into her eyes. She stared back, but no one was there. No recognition. No light. No love. Nothing. He felt her skin. It was clammy. He felt her pulse. It was weak, but steady.

He left her and went to check Crispin. Same story. He could carry Asia, but with Crispin, there was no chance. It was triage. Crispin would have to wait. He lifted Asia onto his shoulder and started to carry her back down the trail to where he had left the Jeep. Then he stopped. Asia would be in bad shape mentally, even if she came though physically. It wouldn’t help her if she lost Crispin, or to know that he had been left behind. Plan B.

Baby Joe carried Asia over to the canoe. One of the dead guys was hanging half over its side, half in the swamp. Baby Joe kicked him in the face and he flopped into the water. Immediately something stirred under the low-hanging branches under the bank. Baby Joe gently laid Asia in the bottom of the canoe and covered her with his shirt. He went back and started to drag Crispin. The goat was idly chewing on the undergrowth. Maybe Crispin wasn’t his type. When he got Crispin to the canoe, he wedged it so it wouldn’t turn turtle, and heaved Crispin over the hull. He went back to look for something to cover Crispin with.

Lord Lundi was making small whimpering noises. He was hyperventilating and the blood bubbled in his destroyed mouth. His one good eye looked up at Baby Joe with silent appeal. Baby Joe studied his anguished face. How much pain would the man be in? What terror? How much did he suffer?

Not enough! Baby Joe took up the machete, reached down, and sliced Lord Lundi’s lips off. He spat in his face, and walked away.

Baby Joe pushed the canoe out into the deepest water at midstream. He had to walk beside it and push it because Crispin’s weight was almost grounding it. He pushed out of a tributary into a broader stretch of water, and then turned toward the direction of the car. He advanced with slow, steady strides, balancing the canoe, his feet heavy on the muddy creek bed, and as he did so ripples arose and spread out behind him on the still water, tiny waves softly colliding with the banks.

Just before he reached the car, the clouds parted for an instant, and the full moon shone down and illuminated the bayou, and laid the shadows of the cypresses on the water, and bore witness to Baby Joe and his struggle and to Asia and Crispin, both still motionless, and staring blank-eyed at the sky and the moon like blind people.

Part 2. Moscow

Just in case you were staying up nights wondering about what Russia has got to do with Swedish rowing boats, here goes…

There is a place in Sweden called Roslagen. It means “the land of rowing.” The Old Norse term for the people who came from there was “the Rus’,” meaning “the men who row.” And they were some rowing-ass motherfuckers. They proved it by rowing all the way to what is now the Ukraine. Of course they didn’t do it overnight, and in those days it was a bit like driving through L.A. after dark, and you were probably going to have to kill a few people in order to get where you were going. By the time they got to Ukraine they pretty much had the killing people deal down pat, and were able to make space to found a state, which they called Kievan Rus’.

Although the real estate changed hands, cultures, and religions many times over the millennia, no one could come up with a better name, and it stuck. So Russia it became. It could have been worse. Apparently the people that were there before the Rus’ muscled in wanted to call it Udmurtia. Maybe they should have. The Cold War would probably never have happened.

The Volga river runs through much of Russia, and happens to be the longest river in Europe, which, for folks fond of boating, makes the decision of where you are going to start parking your cities a no-brainer. Volga is derived from an earlier Scythian word, meaning “wetness” or “moist,” which was linguistically fertile ground for coming up with a killer name for a river, but folks were more religious back then, so the Gash River was out. The Turkic people who were there before the Slavs called it the Yellow River. You can draw your own conclusions there.

At the headwaters of the Volga, close to its source, the Moskva River rises, eventually flowing into it via the Oka. Apparently, nobody knows where the name comes from, although theories abound, one of which is that it was originally pronounced “mosh kvat,” local dialect for “fuck you,” which is what the locals said to Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy when he rocked up in 1157 and announced that he was annexing the joint.

But royalty will have its way, especially when it has an army and you don’t, so old Yuri—colorfully known as Yuri the Long Armed, possibly owing to his propensity for putting the snatch on other people’s dominions—gave the local oiks the Big E, and founded a city with walls and a moat, which was always a smart move in those days, what with hordes of Mongols and Tatars wandering about all over the place, shooting arrows into all and sundry and being generally unsociable. So old Yuri was a solid, common-sense kind of guy, but he didn’t have much in the way of an imagination because when his city was finished he decided to call it “The City by the Moskva,” which transliterates into Moscow. He should have stuck with Mosh Kvat.

For the next several hundred years, the history of Moscow was pretty much in keeping with the history of any decent-sized European city back then. You know the routine: plagues, uprisings, invasions, people come and burn your city down, you build it back up, someone else burns it down, you build it back up again, all these foreign bastards marching up and down your streets in muddy boots with their dicks out, eating all your chickens, crapping in your onion patch, guzzling all your wine, making off with your crown jewels, scratching terribly rude things on the walls of your palaces and churches, making you sign treaties in dodgy languages so you can’t read the small print.

Mongols, Tatars, Poles, Lithuanians…you name it. Even the Swedes came, although apparently they only came to get their rowing boats back. After a time, over in Europe, nobody who was anybody failed to get themselves invaded by Napoleon, but the Muscovites—as they were then, and are still today, known as (way to go, Yuri)—eventually got so fed up with all that invading and burning shite that when it was their turn, they burned the city down themselves and scarpered across the Steppes with all the goodies, leaving old Nappy with nothing but a long walk home in the snow.

But all that was just a cakewalk compared to what happened in the twentieth century. “Muscovite” is not really a very tough-sounding name. “Spartan” sounds tough. “Zulu,” “Cossack,” and “Viking” all sound tough. “Muscovite” sounds like something vegetarians put on toast in the morning. But Muscovites are among the toughest, most resilient sons of bitches on the planet.

People coming from a city having one of the most miserable histories imaginable in terms of the personal experience of its inhabitants throughout the last century, who can not only survive but overcome World War One, the Russian Revolution, Communism, World War Two, famines, Hitler, Stalin, the Gulags, Collectivization, the Cold War, the KGB, the Iron Curtain, and the full and unabridged performance of
Uncle Vanya
, in a town that is under a blanket of snow for at least three months every year, with their cultural identity, their civic pride, and their art and artifacts still intact, have to have some serious major-league shithouse-rat-level survival instincts, and
cojones
the size of Halloween pumpkins.

In the years since the dissolution of the USSR, Moscow has developed at warp speed into a contemporary, sophisticated city with a burgeoning economy and a sizzling nightlife. Moscow is now the fifth-largest city in the world. It has three times as many square meters of park per person as Paris, London, or New York. It has more resident billionaires than any other city. Its palaces, churches, galleries, and universities are second to none. The performing arts are as well represented in Moscow as in any metropolis in the world. Some of its metro stations would be called palaces anywhere else, and nobody draws pictures of ejaculating dicks or writes “Chelsea Boot Boys” or “Fab 5 Freddy” on the walls.

Moscow also has a few other interesting statistics. Members of the Bratva, the particularly violent and ruthless Russian equivalent of the Mafia, have three times more chance of getting knocked off by a rival than do their US counterparts; an average of fifty cars a day get swiped; it’s harder to find a cup of tea in Brighton than it is to find a corrupt official in Moscow; it is the holiday destination of choice for traffickers in guns, drugs, and human beings from all over the world; and they reckon fifty percent of its economy is connected to organized crime. Plus half the city’s youth call themselves “Gopniki” and sit around on benches all day getting shitfaced on 9% ABV alcoholic beverages called Jaguars, and twenty-five percent of the male population between ages fifteen and fifty croak from alcohol abuse.