Age of Voodoo (27 page)

Pearce grabbed Gonzalez’s wrist and tried to pry himself free, but the colonel bore down with startling strength. His fingers dug into Pearce’s flesh as though it were bread dough. Pearce’s face turned a terrible shade of red and his mouth worked effortfully as he tried to suck in air through his constricted windpipe.

He abandoned the attempt to dislodge Gonzalez’s hand and went for the colonel’s eyeballs instead, jabbing with his thumbs. Gonzalez seemed unperturbed. His expression was impassive, no ferocity, no aggression, just the calm mask of someone doing their job. He gathered up both of Pearce’s wrists with his free hand and levered them aside, out of harm’s way. The throttling continued.

Morgenstern had by now recovered her wits. She drew her sidearm, a MK23 semiauto, and lined it up with Gonzalez’s temple. Point blank. In a moment’s time the top of Gonzalez’s skull would be blown clean off.

But the colonel, spying the danger, swung Pearce bodily around and slammed him into his teammate like a living baseball bat. Morgenstern was sent skittering across the linoleum. She managed to get off a shot but it went wild, bullet embedding in the ceiling. She caromed head first into the wall and the gun was jettisoned from her hand.

Pearce’s face was now purple and he was starting to spasm uncontrollably. There was no fight left in him. He was on the brink of passing out.

Lex stepped forward, SIG raised. Finally he had a clear line of fire. Before, Morgenstern had been in the way. He hadn’t dared take a shot for fear of hitting her by mistake.

He squeezed the trigger and planted a bullet in Gonzalez’s shoulder.

The force of the impact alone should have knocked Gonzalez off his feet. Shock and pain should have incapacitated him.

Gonzalez was unfazed. A huge chunk had been taken out of his upper arm, blood was flowing freely, yet he still stood, still strangling Pearce. It was almost as though Lex hadn’t shot him at all.

“The head,” Morgenstern said, dazed and bleary. “In the fucking head.”

Lex recalled Sampson describing how to bring down a zombie.
Head shot. Destroy the brain stem. It’s the only way
.

Was that what this was? Gonzalez was a zombie? This was what one looked like?

It really didn’t matter. A head shot was a head shot, after all. No one, be they man or monster, could withstand having half their cerebellum punched out by a Parabellum round.

The SIG boomed. Gonzalez’s head recoiled like a coconut hit dead-on at a shy. Stuff from it spattered the wall behind.

He ought to have toppled instantly. Dropped like a stone.

How come he didn’t? How come he remained upright, remorselessly clutching Pearce’s throat in a death grip?

Slowly Gonzalez swivelled his head to look at Lex. A whole portion of his cranium had been removed, as though someone had dug a trowel into his brow and scooped upwards. Grey matter glistened. Blood oozed down his face, carrying shards of skull bone with it.

Yet his eyes still stared, befuddled but bright. Something continued to live inside him, even with half his brain gone.

“Zuvembie,” Albertine whispered.

Lex could not make sense of it. He tried to analyse how a bullet in the shoulder at a range of ten yards could fail to stop an opponent in his tracks, let alone a head shot. Gonzalez had survived the unsurvivable. The laws of ballistics had been rescinded. No, the laws of
nature
.

Pearce was in dire straits. His eyes rolled up. He was twitching, his legs kicking like those of a hanged man in his final throes.

Lex tamped down his astonishment. Pearce’s life was at stake. That consideration overrode all others.

He advanced on Gonzalez, SIG held out, pumping 9mm bullet after 9mm bullet into the colonel. He aimed for joints, weak spots in the human physiology, anywhere crucial to the movement of the body. Gonzalez might be unkillable, but if his basic biomechanics were messed with, he could surely be crippled, rendered inert.

One shot blasted through the elbow of the arm with which Gonzalez was holding Pearce. The arm was virtually severed in two and, unable to bear the Thirteener’s weight any more, tore apart. Pearce fell with the hand still around his neck, although its crushing grip had relaxed. He and the gristle-ended stump of forearm hit the floor together.

Another bullet took out Gonzalez’s left knee, and he staggered but shifted his weight to the right leg. He shuffled towards Lex, at the same time reaching for his Glock with his one good arm. The SIG obliterated most of that hand, leaving just the thumb and some of the meat of the palm.

A bullet shattered Gonzalez’s pelvis. A bullet gouged through his neck, splintering the cervical vertebrae. His half-missing head flopped, and what was left of his brain spilled out like porridge from an overturned bowl.

Even then, he continued on the offensive. He lumbered forwards, head lolling, yellowy gaze locked sideways on Lex. As long as Lex posed a threat to his existence, Gonzalez would not give up. Indeed
could
not, it appeared. He had to kill Lex, while his body was still able to. Long after the point where he should have been lying on the ground in a lifeless, mangled heap, something drove him murderously on.

The SIG clicked dry. Lex swapped out the spent magazine for a fresh one, and as he did so called out, “Someone! Anyone! What do I need to do here? The bugger won’t take the hint and die.”

“Just keep firing,” said Morgenstern. She had shoved herself up into a sitting position and her MK23 semiauto was back in her hand. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

Together they pumped a score of bullets into Gonzalez, and more. Gobbets of him flew away like the wreckage from a piñata. He skipped and shook in a grisly St Vitus dance. At last his body could no longer physically support itself. The damage to muscle and bone was too extensive, too catastrophic. He was a walking shambles, more of him injured than intact. His fatigues hung off him in tatters. He teetered on the spot, some three paces from Lex, close enough that the abattoir reek of blood and ruptured organ coming off him was sickeningly strong. He fumbled one last time for his Glock, trying vainly to hook his thumb into the trigger guard to draw it, even though he lacked the fingers to use it. Then he collapsed.

Almost literally collapsed.

Bits of him breaking apart and tumbling off as he fell.

Like a bombed skyscraper disintegrating.

A man became a gory jumble of body parts.

Silence reigned.

B
UCKER HAD BEEN
yelling over the comms for some time.

“Who’s firing? Answer me, dammit! Do you have enemy contact? Have you engaged?”

Lex had been aware of the voice in his earpiece but only distantly, as background noise. He had been too preoccupied with killing Gonzalez to give it much attention.

Now he said, “This is White Feather. We have engaged with one enemy. Enemy is down. No fatalities on our side, but Whisper is hurt.”

“How badly?”

“No idea. I’m going to check.”

“Do not move from your position. We’re on our way.”

“Roger, Big Chief Dirty.”

Lex knelt beside Pearce. He felt for a pulse and found one. Strong. The Thirteener stirred at his touch. His eyelids fluttered open. He let out a sound that could have been a word or simply a groan. Finger-mark bruises patterned his neck like livid leopard spots. The whites of his eyes were crazed with burst capillaries. His face, at least, was returning to its normal colour.

“Fuck,” he croaked.

“Succinctly put,” said Lex.

“Morgenstern?”

“Here, Pearce.” Morgenstern crawled over to his side. “Let’s take a look at you.” She palpated his neck gently, then with equal gentleness clasped his jaw and rolled his head from side to side. She inspected his pupils and asked him a few simple questions with yes-or-no answers.

“You’ll live,” was her expert prognosis. “Contusions. Some trauma to the trachea. You’re going to have a hell of a sore throat for the next few days and probably a nasty headache too. But nothing’s broken. No nerve damage. Try to keep from talking too much, if you can. That’ll aid the healing process.”

“Difficult,” he said with a partial smile.

“Yeah, I realise it’s a big ask.”

Footfalls echoed along the passage. The rest of Team Thirteen raced into view.

“Pearce,” Buckler barked. “What’s your status?”

Pearce raised a shaky but resolute thumb.

“And what in the name of fuck,” Buckler said, turning his attention to the mess on the floor, “is that?”

“That is—
was
—someone called Colonel Gonzalez,” said Lex.

“Jesus. The site military supervisor. What’d the guy do to deserve being shot to shreds?”

“Refused to die.”

Buckler cocked his head. “You being a wiseass?”

“Dove’s right, LT,” said Morgenstern. “Gonzalez would not go down—not until we’d put the best part of forty rounds in him.”

“But why shoot him in the first place?”

“Self-preservation. Gonzalez was attempting to terminate Pearce. With his bare hands.”

“Come again?”

“He was a zuvembie,” said Albertine. “His mind was not its own. He was under the sway of a bokor.”

“You’re sure of that?”

Albertine was badly shaken by the carnage she had just witnessed. She struggled to maintain her composure. “As sure as I can be. I’ve never personally seen a zuvembie before today, but this one matched all the criteria. Tremendous strength. Incapable of speech. Vacant expression. Also, impervious to pain and able to carry on functioning in spite of physical damage. More so than I would have thought possible. Lex and Morgenstern had to virtually demolish him before he would stop.”

“But why did he attack?” said Buckler. “What was he doing here?”

“My guess is he was on guard duty. Patrolling this floor. Morgenstern and Pearce challenged him. He viewed them as aggressors and acted accordingly.”

“I thought you said he was mindless.”

“In one sense, yes. In another sense, no. A zuvembie retains a very primitive understanding of the world. It is capable of basic thought—survival responses and suchlike—and can be put to work performing menial tasks. Somewhat like a human robot. Gonzalez, being a soldier, would have been trained to fight, and would have still known how to while a zuvembie, even if he had no clear idea of who he was fighting, or why. His motor skills remained unaffected, even if his higher cognitive functions didn’t.”

“He was left here deliberately, then, as a kind of watchdog?”

“That’s it. To intercept and confront intruders.”

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” Buckler ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. At least now we know for sure what we’re up against. There are going to be more of these things lurking around. But they can be stopped, that’s the lesson we can draw from this. It takes firepower but it can be done.”

“Might I ask a question?” said Lex.

“Sure. If you must.”

“Two questions, actually. The first to Albertine. You said Gonzalez was under the sway of a bokor. Papa Couleuvre, in this instance. Is Couleuvre like a puppet master, pulling the zuvembie’s strings?”

“Not as such. He isn’t commanding it with mental powers, if that’s what you’re getting at. Nor is he ‘seeing’ through its eyes, in case that’s worrying you too. Think of it more as the bokor exerting his authority over the zuvembie. He directs it to do something, then leaves it to get on with it. Rather like you hiring someone to wash your car for you. You don’t need to stand over the person, showing them where to wipe with the cloth and telling them not to forget the hubcaps. You just expect they’ll do the job as required. The only difference is that a zuvembie will keep at whatever task it’s set, tirelessly, relentlessly, until you instruct it to do something else.”

“Right. I see. So it’s not as if killing Papa Couleuvre will somehow halt all the zuvembies in their tracks?”

“No. That’s not how this sort of sorcery works.”

“Okay.” Lex turned back to Buckler. “Then my question to you, lieutenant, is how many people were there originally at Anger Reef? What were the staffing levels here?”

“Round about fifty personnel in total,” Buckler said. “Technicians and such.”

“That’d be my estimate, based on the extent of the living quarters. And I reckon it would be fair to assume that most if not all of them have been turned into zuvembies.”

“How do you figure that?” asked Sampson.

“At the risk of sounding like Sherlock Holmes, it’s elementary. There’s the combat footage for starters. I counted a good dozen silhouettes moving across the camera’s field of vision. Those were just the ones I could see. The Marines were met by an overwhelming force. Logic dictates that the zuvembies outnumbered them by a factor of at least four to one. That suggests that almost everyone here has been, if you will, zuvembified. On top of which, Colonel Gonzalez was a military officer. He had a gun, probably the only firearm on the premises under normal circumstances. It was his responsibility to maintain order and ensure the welfare of the civilians on site. If he was co-opted into the zuvembie ranks—the one person who might have been able to prevent things getting out of hand—then what chance would the others have stood? Then there are the Marines themselves.”