Chapter Eighteen
From somewhere out in the night, someone coughed. It sounded like a plaguer trying to hack his lungs up, but magnified four or five times.
Ryan looked around sharply from the bonfire where he squatted. The crude grass huts of a small ville stood in a ragged circle around him, his companions and their hosts.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Tigre,”
the ville boss replied. You couldn’t call him a baron. Not without laughing, anyway. He was a little middle-aged guy with pipestem arms and legs and a potbelly hanging over a greasy loincloth. And his domain was about sixty people living in fifteen or twenty huts in a clearing in the heavy woods.
“You mean, some kind of mutant tiger?” Mildred asked. She was gnawing the roast rodent on a stick someone had handed her.
“Oh, no,” the ville boss said in Spanish, grinning. “Just a tiger. They roam these woods.”
Mildred looked around in alarm when Ricky translated.
“What?” Jak demanded. “Feel better if mutie tiger?”
“Well...no,” Mildred admitted, relaxing slightly. “Now that you mention it. It just gave me a turn. I suppose they—their ancestors—must’ve escaped from zoos after the war. If they made it through the skydark somehow, the climate would suit them pretty well.”
“We should be safe here,” the ville’s senior woman said. Ryan wasn’t sure whether she was the headman’s wife or sister. He wouldn’t even assume she couldn’t be both. She was taller and sturdier than he was, built like a cinderblock, in fact, as well as visibly younger. But not that much different to look at. “They won’t come near the fire.”
“Even
chupacabras
don’t like fire,” the boss said with a cackle.
“Shit,” Mildred said. “Not
chupacabras
.”
The ville woman shrugged. “We don’t get them much down here these days,” she said. “Not like when I was a little girl. They mostly stick higher up in the mountains.”
The boss tittered. “After we taught them a sharp lesson,” he said. “It was during a year the rains didn’t come they started getting bold.”
Ryan took a healthy swallow of the local palm wine they’d given him in half a coconut. Coconut shells seemed to serve these people for all vessels, mugs and bowls alike.
Mildred tried a sip, but the stuff made her stomach roll over on its back and beg. For mercy. It was sour, vile, and slimy. She suspected that like a lot of quaint third-world bush types, the locals helped the fermenting process along by chewing the components and spitting them into the pot.
But her companions were slugging it down without batting an eye. Just as they’d devoured the stew of boiled rice, mashed bananas and some kind of stringy meat they’d been served earlier. She suspected the meat was monkey, which was never going to be her favorite, but it was better than, say, rat.
Mildred didn’t know if the monkeys the villagers had stewed up had spikes or not. She didn’t ask. She was hungry after their third day on the trail. She noticed that Jak didn’t ask, either, despite his distaste for “tainted” flesh. That gave her a chuckle.
The other villagers squatted around them in a big-eyed, respectful circle, allowing the elder pair places of honor with the guests by the fire. Either the common tribesfolk had eaten earlier, or would later. Only the chief, the woman and the visitors were served food and drink.
Lucky us, Mildred thought, holding her breath and knocking back another swallow of the wine. It coated her tongue in nasty sickness. Her gag reflex fought it all the way down.
“That was the year the rainy season didn’t come till late,” the woman agreed. “The drought was worse in the mountains. Usually the mountains get more rain higher up. Not that year. We had a lot of animals coming by the ville. They gave us a lot of trouble. Some ate our crops. Some ate
us
. Especially the monsters, obviously. The mountains teem with them.”
“The
chupacabras
are worst, though,” the man said, as she nodded agreement. “They organize, see. Like monkeys. Mebbe smarter.” He shrugged and took a drink of wine.
The ville elders continued their assessment of the
chupacabras’
tactics. Normally the goatsuckers hunted by stealth—and alone. But that year, driven from their mountain realms en masse by drought, they ran—and attacked—in packs of twenty or more.
“First they started taking people who were out alone after dark,” the woman said. “That’s always dangerous. We try not to do it. But you know how people are, no? A month or two goes by without a monster attack, we get careless. Lazy. Then a
tigre
or a
gato
armado
or the scorpion dogs or spike monkeys grab some poor person walking back from the fields alone, or some drunk farmer stumbling outside his hut to piss in the middle of the night.
“Then they started invading homes by night. The
chupacabras
often raid huts, so it didn’t seem so bad at first. No worse than any other time. We just had to be on our guard more.
“But even after we caught and killed one trying to snatch a baby from a crib, the night invasions didn’t stop. Then packs started attacking small groups going out after dark. Then even people working the fields or hunting in the daytime.”
The man shook his head. “It was a terrible time. We and the other villes of the valley lost many people, as well as dogs and other valuable livestock. It got so nobody dared venture out in groups of less than five or six, armed with spears, clubs and cane knives.
“Next the monsters started attacking whole villes, in force, at night. They all but wiped out one ville half a day’s walk upstream. They stopped being afraid of fire. They’d attack people gathered around fires.”
“They don’t like having flaming torches stuck in their ugly faces any better than anyone else,” the woman said in satisfaction.
“So when they got that bold—”
“That
desperate,
” the woman said.
The man nodded. “Then we had to get cagey ourselves.”
“What did you do?” J.B. asked.
He had been knocking back the horrible palm wine as if it were actually good.
“We set up a trap,” the headman said. “We stood watch around the ville with torches and weapons in hand, night-long vigils for one whole week. Sometimes we saw eyes shining back from the bush, which we’d cleared back to forty or fifty yards to make it harder to sneak up on us. Sometimes the eyes were big and widely spaced—
tigres
or armor cats. They gave us trouble, too, but nowhere near the goatsuckers. They might be cunning but they’re more like animals, you know?
“But most of all, we saw the nasty slanty glows of
chupacabras’
eyes. We could feel their hunger and their hate. We pissed them off, keeping watch like that. They had no chance against us. They were smart enough to know it.”
“So after a week of no attacks—” the woman took up the narrative as the man stopped to wet his whistle “—we had a big party to celebrate. We danced and sang and got drunk and went off into our huts to screw and sleep off the wine.”
Ryan got an especially wolfish grin on his harshly handsome features. “You set them up.”
Their round, dark faces split into grins. “Of course!” the woman said. “They were smart, these monsters
.
Smart enough to see their opportunity. Smart enough to see we had gotten overconfident. They waited until mebbe an hour before dawn—”
“When folk are always most vulnerable,” J.B. said. He could see where this was going.
“Sí,”
the headman said. “Then they hit us from all directions. There must have been a hundred of the muties. Usually they attack silently. Not that night. They were chirping and screeching to one another in their eerie voices as they came. They were enraged, and they were famished. And they were going to slake their hunger for vengeance as well as for the meat on our bones.”
“And of course we had been drinking water,” the woman said, “and only pretending to drink ourselves triple-stupe. We lay awake waiting. We planned to sleep in shifts, to stay as fresh as possible, but no one
could
sleep. And we kept waiting until they started ripping open the huts.”
The huts here were more substantial than most of the ones built closer to the coast, where hurricanes could get an unobstructed shot at them. They actually had walls of sorts, although these seemed more like mats woven of sticks and grasses than anything more solid.
“We laid into them with everything we had. We even had friends and cousins from other villes hiding with us. Plus refugees from isolated huts and villes they’d attacked, survivors.
“And so it was we, not they, who took our vengeance. Ah, but that was a lovely bloodletting! We stabbed and beat and hacked them. We were wild things ourselves. We knew no fatigue, any more than mercy. We knocked them down and then ran after the ones who could still flee, while the children and the old ones beat the wounded muties to death with rocks and sticks. We chased them through the brush, across the fields, into the woods.
“They were too surprised and terrified by the hot reception we gave them to try to turn back and ambush us. And only the fastest—or mebbe the first to flee—got away.”
“We counted a hundred and thirty bodies the next morning,” the woman said. “We stuck twenty or thirty on sharpened stakes around the ville to rot, far enough out not to give us the black shits or other sickness. The rest we piled up in the middle of the ville, right where we sit now, and burned. Oh, how nasty it smelled! Yet wonderful, too.”
“After that,” the man said, “it was over ten years before any
chupacabras
were seen in our valley at all. Even the other monsters seemed to get the message. We had little trouble from any of them—even the scorpion dogs who fear nothing—until the rains returned to the mountains and they all went back to their heights.”
J.B. stood up and spanked dust off the back of his trousers. “Now, that’s the kind of bedtime story I like,” he said. “But if it’s all the same to you good people, I reckon it’s time we hit the hay. We’ve got miles to walk in the morning.”
Ryan nodded agreement. “Thanks for the hospitality,” he said. “And the story. I’m a sucker for happy endings, myself.”
“If we could only trouble you for a place to sleep, please,” Krysty said, sidling up to her man and slipping an arm around his narrow waist.
“Of course!” the headman beamed. He gestured grandly at the hut directly behind them. It was easily the biggest in the ville, about twenty feet in diameter and a couple of feet taller than the rest. “You can have our hut for the night. We insist!”
“Thank you kindly,” Ryan said. He had his arm around Krysty’s shoulder.
“There is one favor we ask in return,” the woman said. “We are a small ville, as you see. The other villes nearby are small, as well, and most of the people who live in them are our cousins.”
“And we don’t get many travelers through here,” the man said. He had a glitter to his eye, Mildred noticed. She had no idea where this was heading.
“So it’s hard to get new blood,” the woman explained. “But we need to. Otherwise we start getting kids with too many fingers and too few eyes, you know? As bad as muties, interbreeding.”
“Um,” Ryan said. “Oh.”
Mildred had to laugh out loud. Maybe it was the palm wine speaking through her. It didn’t have a high alcohol content, she was pretty sure, but she wasn’t used to drinking much, either. But it delighted her to see Ryan at a loss for words, for once.
“We see, of course, that two of your males are paired,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “We respect that, of course. We know the rules of hospitality. We are not
jivaros
.”
“Jivaros?”
J.B. asked.
“Legendary cannies,” Ricky said. “Some say they’re a real tribe on the mainland, down south. It just means ‘hicks’ here, really.”
“But three have no mates,” the woman went on. “The old one and the young ones. We ask therefore that they do us the honor of sleeping with some of our unmarried women.”
A pair of giggling young women appeared beside Doc. He looked around in bewilderment as they tugged him unceremoniously to his feet by the sleeves of his frock coat. Obviously premarital sex wasn’t a problem in this ville.
Doc straightened and brushed off his sleeves. “When in Rome, they say. Lead on, ladies! I am entirely at your disposal.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Chupacabras,”
Mildred said. “I thought there weren’t many of those in our world.”
The elder couple’s hut was capacious, containing a central pole, woven sleeping mats scattered around and not much else. Light from the bonfire outside, which had been allowed to burn low and was being tended by a couple of kids, flickered through the open door, giving a shifting, uncertain illumination to the interior. The door was a rolled-up mat that could be unfastened and allowed to hang when necessary.
Aside from the slight scent of stale sweat, human grease and smoke, apparently from when it was too rainy to build fires outside, it didn’t stink hardly at all. Krysty had slept worse places in her life. Lots of them, in fact.
“Mebbe they’re different
chupacabras,
” Krysty said. “Not like the creatures in San Juan.”
“Turns out we were wrong,” Ryan said. “What difference does that make? They’re fucking muties. They’ll try to kill us if we run into them—like everything else that lives in the direction we’re going, apparently.”
“Why not try another direction?” J.B. asked.
“Two reasons,” Ryan said. “First off, I’m guessing this Handsome guy is concentrating his island-conquering efforts on the coast, for the time being, anyway. Just stands to reason. Most of what’s worthwhile, ports and trade goods and that, they’re all on the ocean. If he gets hold of enough of those, he’ll control this whole region, or the parts worth having, instead of spreading his troops out trying to subdue every little rad-blasted valley.”
Ryan looked across the circle to Ricky. For some reason, the kid hadn’t availed himself of the opportunity to go with one of the young women, despite their urging. From the way he looked at them, licking his lips and swallowing, he liked them fine; that wasn’t the problem. Krysty wondered if he was just shy.
“That square with what you know, kid?” Ryan asked.
Ricky nodded. He sat cross-legged with his hands on his thighs, rocking back and forth slowly and staring at something nobody else could see. Krysty reckoned she was just as glad she couldn’t.
It wasn’t likely anything she hadn’t seen before.
“That was the idea we got from what the travelers and refugees said,” he said.
Ryan nodded.
“What’s your other reason, Ryan?” J.B. asked. He and Mildred sat side by side, just touching. They were a lot more restrained in their displays of affection than Krysty and Ryan were. But they couldn’t hide from Krysty that they didn’t plan on going right to sleep after the palaver was over.
“Well,” Ryan said, “it’s like this. The monsters have to love the mountains for some reason. They aren’t likely hanging up there because they like the scenery. So what are the odds they’ve got some kind of connection to the...place we’re looking for?”
Krysty glanced at Ricky. He didn’t respond. It wasn’t as if they could keep secret that they were looking for something. But they couldn’t ask for hints on how to find the mat-trans without revealing something about it. So Ryan had decided to tell people they were looking for some kind of special cave or hidden place, and let them draw their own conclusions about what they wanted with it.
The odds were good they’d never imagine anything close to the truth.
J.B. nodded. “Does make sense.” He looked up, grinning ruefully. “Damn it, anyway. If that’s right, the closer we get to our goal, the more monsters we’ve got to wade through.”
“Well,” Ryan said, “I might be wrong.”
But he didn’t sound optimistic, nor did Krysty feel that way herself.
“So,” Ryan said, turning to their new friend and tipping his head to one side so the curly, shaggy hair hung down over his weather-beaten face, “Ricky. Why are you hanging with us, exactly? I thought you were fixated on finding and rescuing your sister.”
“Yes,” Ricky said slowly. He didn’t look up or even seem to focus his eyes on the here and now. “I want to find her. I will find her. And then I will make the
coños
pay!”
That didn’t seem likely to Krysty—not the finding his sister part, because she had no idea. But the part about making El Guapo, his shark-toothed sec boss or really any number of his henchmen pay for abducting her. Not that he hadn’t exacted a down payment when he’d shot several of them, rescuing Ryan from their flanking maneuver several days before. But still, it was a pretty tall order.
Of course Ryan didn’t buy that any more than she did.
“Okay,” he said, drawing the word out long. “So, then, we’re headed into the mountains. Away from the coast, where you say this El Guapo is hanging and banging. And if we find what we’re looking for, we’re not going back that way anytime soon.”
Ryan shook his head. “At first I thought mebbe we might sign on with him. You know, a man like that, building an army like that, he’s got to rely heavy-like on mercies. He’ll always be hiring.”
“You wouldn’t!” Ricky burst out. He snapped upright and stared at Ryan with frightened-cat eyes. “You couldn’t! They’re coldhearts! Monsters!”
“Son,” J.B. said gently, “you don’t know us. You don’t know what we’ve done to survive. You don’t know what we’ll do to keep on doing that thing. Fact is, we were also thinking seriously about taking up with a gang of pirates not so long ago. Doubt they was much better than this Handsome fella of yours.”
Ricky looked at him, first as if he thought the armorer was joking, then with a look of outrage so intense Krysty almost laughed. Truly, the boy had to have led a sheltered life, in a prosperous family, in a happy ville. Whose very prosperity and happiness obviously doomed them, in the end, despite their willingness to fight to keep both.
“Why didn’t you join them, then?”
J.B. shrugged. “Same reason we aren’t likely to sign on with El Guapo anytime soon,” he said. “Before we could reach the negotiation stage with the pirates, we kind of got crosswise of them. Wound up putting holes in a few of them, truth to tell. Mebbe more than a few.”
“Plus the ones your boobies blew sky-high, J.B.,” Ryan said with satisfaction.
“There’s that, surely.”
“Wait,” Ricky said, staring at J.B. with his outrage turning to awe. “That big explosion in the harbor a few hours before I met you. I didn’t see it, but you could’ve heard the blast on the other side of the island, and I saw the black smoke rill up into the sky. Was that you?”
J.B. nodded. “It was.”
“Magnífico,”
the boy breathed.
J.B. dipped his head self-deprecatingly. “Things sort of came together, you know? Anyways, looks like now we gone and crapped the bed where this El Guapo’s concerned, too.”
He reached up to scratch his head under his fedora. “The fact is, we got a way of rubbing people the wrong way. Shame, sometimes.”
Ricky shook his head in wonder. “I knew I was right to join you.”
“Actually,” Mildred said drily, “you tried to rob us.”
“I was hungry! After that, I mean. And that’s the reason I stay with you. I want to stay alive, you see. I need to, if I’m ever going to find Yami!”
Ryan scratched his upper lip with his thumb. “Well, we do have a knack for surviving,” he admitted. “But we also have a knack for getting into places where that is far from given. And fireblast, kid! We got a way of being hard on people who travel with us, I got to tell you.”
Ricky shook that off as if trying to dislodge a biting fly from his ear. He’s young, Krysty thought. He doesn’t believe him. He probably didn’t yet believe he’d ever really die. Kids that age just didn’t. Even though he’d seen just how fragile life was, up close and in the most horrifying way possible.
“All right,” Ryan said, hunkering down so he was at eye level with the boy. “What’s the real reason?”
To his credit, and a bit to Krysty’s surprise, Ricky didn’t try to dodge. He swallowed hard, and in the bad light looked as if his olive skin got a shade or two paler. But, after that hesitation, he answered straight.
“It’s like this,” he said. “El Guapo will never let you and your friends roam free about Puerto Rico. He must neutralize you.”
“How do you reckon that?” J.B. asked. “Dark night, he’s got an army! There’s just six of us. Okay, seven, counting you and that fancy whisper-shooting blaster of yours. Even if his army’s just a few hundred strong, like it’s liable to be, we aren’t a trickling piss in the mighty ocean by comparison. Ow, why did you elbow me in the ribs like that, Mildred?”
Ignoring the glare she gave J.B., the boy smiled broadly.
“El Guapo means to be the big man on the island, you know? The top man. The only man. But you, Señor Ryan, you are
muy macho
. Your friends are
muy especial
. El Guapo will never be the only real man on the island as long as you’re on it. Nor will he be the biggest.
“You’ve made your presence known to him. So El Guapo must deal with you and your friends—recruit you, or kill you. And after our meeting with the EUN, he will now want to see you die slowly. He does not like frustration, this man.”
“No,” Ryan said slowly. “I reckon he doesn’t, at that.”
Ricky beamed. “So you see, the Handsome One will hunt you. He
is
hunting you. He can’t bear the thought of a man such as you roaming the island, giving the lie to his claims of being the biggest, the baddest, the most powerful. So where you are, there El Guapo will be, sooner instead of later. And then I will find my sister and set her free!”
Ryan sat down, arching a brow. “Mebbe,” he said dubiously. “It’s still hard to believe he’d take time off from his important business of conquering the nuke-sucking island to take a chance against a raggedy-assed bunch like us.”
“You will see I’m right,” the boy said. “Just wait.”
* * *
A
S
R
YAN
HAD
FEARED
—and expected—the clues they got led them deeper inland into the mountains.
“My cousin,
señor,
” the man in the battered hat said. “She knew a man—a lover, to tell the truth, which is a scandal to her poor mother—who said he saw a curious cave opening into some rocks. It wasn’t so easy to spot. An outcropping hid it. He happened to be out hunting, and came at it from across a hill on the other side of the valley at just the right time for the light to strike it.”
“So what did he do?” Mildred asked.
The trader shrugged. “He said a monster attacked him then. So he ran away. Nor would he ever go back, or even tell anyone about where he found the cave.”
“What kind of monster?” Ricky asked, sounding more excited than he should have.
Ryan was scouting around, not looking at the little dusty trader or his loaded donkey. The trail they were following ran along a jagged-back ridgetop, with sparse vegetation. It gave him a pretty good look in all directions. The problem was, it also gave everybody in all directions a good look at
them
. Some heavy forests grew nearby, so people in them had the edge in seeing without being seen.
“That, he would not say. He did say he saw many more monsters there than he had ever seen before in his life. He said more than one chased him before he got away. Truly, his experience terrified him. He was so scared his hair turned white.”
“That doesn’t actually happen,” Mildred began.
“Shut it,” Ryan said sharply. “We’re here for information. Not debate.”
Mildred scowled mutinously, but she shut it.
“Muchas gracias, señor,”
Ryan told the man. “Good journey.”
“Buena viaje, señores y señoritas.”
The man hauled on the braided leather rein fastened to his donkey’s halter. Reluctantly, the little beast pulled its snout out of a clump of grass and followed him down the trail, chewing placidly.
“I think that was a load of B.S.,” Mildred said. “Getting scared doesn’t actually turn a person’s hair white.”
“Do I care?” Ryan said. “What does anybody think who isn’t fixated on this damn hair-color thing?”
“I think,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with a handkerchief, “that guy had a tail. Hard to see. Tip just sticks out the bottom of that long shirt thing he’s got on.”
Ryan didn’t even look after the trader with the big hat and the tiny beast of burden. “Anybody think anything that might, you know, actually load us some magazines?”
“How can we trust him?” Mildred said. “I mean, if he exaggerates about—”
“Mildred.”
“Sorry, Ryan. Shutting up now.”
“Notwithstanding the veracity, or lack thereof, in certain details of the man’s account,” Doc said, “in broadest outline, what he told us is much of a piece with the rest of what we have been hearing.”
“What that mean?” Jak demanded.
“It means,” J.B. said, “that just because he might have miscounted the number of rivets on an undercarriage, doesn’t mean a wag didn’t run over him.”
Jak grunted. “Big help.”
“So, what do you think, lover?” Krysty asked.
“The one place we need is the place that’s swarming thickest with monsters, on a place called Monster Island,” Ryan said. “I think that sucks.”
* * *
T
HEIR
QUESTIONS
CONTINUED
to evoke mostly blank stares and fearful evasions, but also tantalizing hints from the people they met. One hint led them west into a lower region, an area of hills and broad valleys. It rained frequently there, through some freak of the Carib weather, disordered by the Big Nuke and skydark and still not settled.
It was raining now, in fact, fat, hot drops that burst like tiny water grenades off the companions’ faces. They trudged along through a break in the trees. A true canopy rain forest had grown up here, with enough breakage in the upper foliage to allow dense undergrowth to sprout in places. They were following a trail, an animal track, really.
Behind Krysty, Doc was softly singing “Sweet Adeline” to himself. When she glanced back through the rain she saw him smiling dreamily. His watery-blue eyes were distant. He was off wandering again, following a path that had nothing to do with his long legs and big feet going up and down in the physical world. He’s back with his wife and children when he smiles like that, she thought.