Restless Soul (11 page)

She paced in a wider circle, the villagers stepping back to give her room. “I appreciate their way of life. I envy it a little. But, Zakkarat—”

“Annjacreed, a man named Erawan—someone already went to get him—has an old motorcycle. They also have a few bicycles and a good cart and an ox. Another man has gone in search of a doctor who lives nearby.”

A burst of laughter came from just outside the doorway. Children were crowded around it under an overhang, one of them parroting Annja’s pacing and facial expressions.

“A bicycle will do little good in all this mud. And I don’t need an ox, Zakkarat. I can walk faster than an ox. The motorcycle would be good, though. But I’ll settle for a map. Ask someone if they can draw—”

“I already asked that. One of them is drawing you a map, the teacher at the front of the room.” Zakkarat cleared his throat. “Annjacreed, I have been thinking a lot about that treasure. Maybe those men came to the cave because they were worried about all the rain. Maybe they wanted to move as much treasure as possible before that cave flooded. Maybe I should go back with the ox and cart and take whatever they could not haul away. I could find the place again, I know that. The men will be gone by the time I get back there. I could take…
we
could take whatever they—”

Annja made a hissing sound like a kettle left too long on a burner. She balled her fist and calmed herself before replying. “Zakkarat, you can’t take the chance that the men will be gone. If they are still up there, they will kill you. And the treasure will do you no good if you’re dead. Your life is worth more than all of that gold.”

One of the children in the doorway balled her fist and hissed like Annja. More laughter followed, and the little white dog yapped happily. The children scattered when a broad-shouldered young man in khaki pants and a pale rose-colored T-shirt entered. He exchanged several words with Rangsan, who in turn spoke to Zakkarat. After a moment, Zakkarat translated for Annja.

“This is Erawan, the man with the motorcycle. He says you can borrow his—”

“We will pay him to borrow his motorcycle.” This came from Luartaro, who had been silent since entering the building.

Zakkarat wagged a finger. “You have only to promise that you will bring it back when you can. He doesn’t care about baht beyond using it to buy gasoline.”

“I promise,” Annja said, facing Erawan. “I promise to bring it back as soon as possible—and give him baht for gas. Please thank him for me. And please remember to tell all of these people about the men and the guns and—”

The wind gusted, bringing a shower of rain inside the building. Thunder boomed and beyond the doorway fingers of lightning flickered. The dog yapped shrilly.

A single burst of gunfire sounded. A heartbeat later another followed. From somewhere outside a woman screamed and a child wailed.

Annja rushed past Erawan, reaching under her shirt and drawing the pistol, stopping just outside the doorway and taking everything in.

The children who had been playing streamed into the other large building across a mud-slick clearing, shooed by a gangly woman in a sleeveless pink shift. Others looked out from windows and doorways, eyes fixed on the body of the small white dog that one of the gunmen had shot.

Annja looked around the corner and saw four men, shoulder to shoulder, machine guns raised at waist height. They were some of the dark-clad men who had come from the Jeeps on the mountain. Annja recognized their hard faces. One stepped forward, fired another burst into the dog’s carcass and hollered something she couldn’t understand. A moment later he repeated it in English.

“The foreigners…the strangers. Surrender them now or everyone dies.”

With another burst of gunfire, they advanced into the village.

Annja whirled in the opposite direction from the gunmen, hugging the building and darting past a bench, then slipping around the far end of the school, leading with the pistol in the event more men had come in from another direction.

No one else had—at least that she could see. Apparently, there were just the four. And they hadn’t seen her yet. She heard the frightened voices of the villagers inside the school, the wails of children across the way, the continued shouts of the gunmen and the rain striking everything.

“Surrender the strangers,” one of the gunmen repeated, punctuating the demand with another burst of gunfire. “The white woman and two men. Surrender them now.”

The villagers don’t understand what you’re saying, she thought. They don’t understand English or Vietnamese, and only one of them seems to speak Thai. But they understand that you killed a little dog and could just as easily kill them. They understand that you’re dangerous. And I understand that you need to be dealt with now.

More children cried, and a woman leaning out a window shouted something Annja couldn’t make out.

“Surrender, or we will kill you one by one!”

“I give up!” This came from Luartaro. There was more wailing and chatter and he shouted to be heard over it. “Don’t shoot anyone. Leave these people alone. It’s me you want.”

“No,” Annja growled. She slipped around the next corner, intending to come up from the other side, where the men still would not be able to see her. “No. No. No, Luartaro.”

“The woman’s not here,” Luartaro continued. “I lost her in the jungle. Who knows what happened to her. It’s just me. Take me and leave this village alone.”

There was a quick exchange in which she could pick up only a few groups of words.

“Surrender to us.”

The phrase was repeated several times and made Annja furious. The villagers had done nothing to provoke this; she and Luartaro and Zakkarat had simply been at the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time, and seen piles of treasure that the smugglers wanted no one else to know about.

She peeked around the next corner, spotting the four men and immediately drawing her head back. They’d advanced a little farther into the village. Another look, and she couldn’t see them anymore; they’d passed out of her line of sight. But she heard Luartaro, again calling for the men to leave the villagers alone.

“On your knees!” shouted the man who could speak English.

Annja crept around the next corner of the building.

“Where is the woman? You lie! She is not in the jungle. She is here. Send her out.”

“Here!” Annja hollered as she spun around the last edge, brought the pistol up and fired at the closest man. “I’m right here.” She struck him in the hand, her intended target, and he dropped the machine gun and fell to his knees, clutching his bloody fingers and cursing in Vietnamese. The next two charged her, firing, the fourth staying put, crouching to make himself a small target and shooting at something she couldn’t see.

I should have gone after them, she thought. Should have left Luartaro and Zakkarat on the trail and gone after the men. Shouldn’t have risked them finding us. Shouldn’t have risked drawing them to the village.

Then she shoved her second thoughts to the back of her mind and managed to squeeze off two more shots before the pistol jammed. One of the two men pitched forward, grabbing at his chest, where she’d hit him. The other grinned wildly and ran at her, sweeping his gun in a tight arc and firing. Bullets chewed into the corner of the building, splintering the bamboo. Annja ducked back around, tossed the pistol and called for the sword. Before it had fully formed the man fired at her again, ripping up more of the building. Someone inside screamed, and needle-fine pieces of bamboo flew into Annja’s arms and legs. She gripped the sword and raised it back over her shoulder and whipped it to the side as he fired again.

She felt blood running down her arm, hotter and thicker than the rain. The wind gusted at that moment, rustling the leaves and rattling the building and providing just enough distraction. The man squinted in the force of the rain that was coming sideways at him. Annja closed in, and as he fired again she brought the sword down, aiming for the machine gun and striking it and his right forearm. He screamed in agony, blood spurting and bone protruding. She reached out and grabbed the gun as it fell, tossing it wide and bringing up her leg, kicking him in the gut and sending him on his back, muddy water splashing up around him. He writhed, grabbing at his arm as she raced past him and rounded the corner of the building to face the fourth gunman.

“Dear God, no!” Annja’s throat constricted as she spotted Luartaro facedown in the mud, the final gunman standing over him, head canted back and yelling to the villagers. The one whose hand she’d shot was struggling to his feet and reaching for a small holster at his side. She knocked him over, kicking him in the jaw as she headed toward the last man standing with a gun.

“It’s me you want!” she spat. “Me, you thief! Murderer!”

He fired as he turned, and she dropped and somersaulted as she closed the distance. Annja was slick with mud, globs of it flying off her as she rose and brought the sword around with as much strength as she could summon.

Who had Joan of Arc fought with it?

How much blood had she drawn?

And how many lives had she ended before she met her own end in a pyre remembered for all time?

Had someone wielded the sword before Joan?

And who would have it after Annja was dust?

The tip of blade caught the end of the machine gun and turned it, bullets still spitting and striking the school building again and chewing into an empty bench out front.

Annja pulled the blade back again and brought it down and around, powered by the fading strength in her burning arms. The impossibly sharp edge struck the machine gun once more and the gunman’s fingers, slicing a few of them off. He didn’t holler in pain as she’d expected. Instead, he screamed in anger and tried to bring the gun up again, pulling the trigger with his thumb.

Annja was furious with herself that she’d not gone after these men earlier, thinking they might not follow them to this village…furious that he and his fellows would jeopardize all these innocent people…and livid to the point that heat surged up her neck into her face, burning her like a fever.

Her arms felt on fire as she swept the sword forward, rain pinging off the blade. She’d intended to strike his arm, maiming him and ending the threat of the machine gun. But he moved at the last instant and slipped in the muck. The sword struck higher, slicing into his chest and ripping through his dark clothes and padded vest. The gun went off as he went down. Bullets spit into the mud and into Annja’s leg. She sucked in her lower lip to keep from crying out, took two steps toward the man she’d just killed, then fell forward into a puddle.

A
NNJA AWOKE ON THE SAME
table Zakkarat had occupied, a coarse blanket draped over her, another folded blanket serving as a pillow. Her head pounded, her right arm ached terribly and her right leg felt…nothing. She propped herself up on her elbows.

“Hello, there.” A man well into his middle years tended her numb leg. “I expected you to be out for quite some time longer, Miss—”

“Creed,” she replied. Her tongue felt thick and unwieldy. She opened her mouth to speak again, but one of the villagers held a ladle up to her lips and encouraged her to drink. The mixture was a pulpy, fruity nectar that tasted sweet and went down her throat slowly.

“Well, Miss Creed.”

“Annja. Call me Annja.” She nodded her thanks to the villager. “And you are?”

She had other questions on her mind…where was Luartaro’s body, where was Zakkarat, what about the gunmen…where were the two thugs she’d left alive? How long had she been out? It was still raining; she could hear it rhythmically strike the roof. It didn’t sound quite so hard as earlier.

Someone had brought a lantern or two into the schoolroom, the glow filled with gnats and illuminating the concerned faces of the villagers and the craggy visage of the doctor. She remembered Zakkarat saying someone had gone to get a doctor who lived nearby. A white man, though well tanned. He was clearly not Thai.

“Nigel Willingson…or Doc as the Thins call me.”

British or Australian from the sound of his accent. She could better pinpoint it when he talked more. “Thank you for taking care of me, Dr. Willingson. Where are—”

“Nigel will do, or just Doc. Nothing formal for me anymore. Doc, actually—I prefer that.”

Definitely British, Annja decided.

He glanced over his shoulder at a broad-shouldered woman with a careworn face and spoke quickly in what Annja assumed was the Thins language. “They want to know why the men came after you. What you did to make those men so angry they would shoot you…and kill little Kiet’s dog. They want to know where you came from and when you will be leaving. These are a peaceful people, Miss Creed.”

“Annja,” she said. “Nothing so formal for me, either.”

He smiled, revealing crooked teeth stained yellow by smoking. “We can deal with their questions later… Annja. Right now I need to deal with your wounds. I’ve already plucked three bullets out of your calf. I have one left to go. They tore into your muscle and did some damage, but nothing you can’t recover from. It certainly could have been much worse. You could have lost the leg. And I want to get those bamboo splinters out of your arm. Give you a tetanus shot just in case…or have you had one recently? There’s a good risk of infection, all the mud and muck you were rolling in. Have you had a tetanus shot?” He didn’t wait for her answer, sticking a needle into her leg. “Then I need to see to your friend.”

“My—”

“Mr. Larto.” He butchered Luartaro’s name.

Her heart leaped. “He’s not dead? Lu is—”

“Ah, Lu…much easier to pronounce. I like that, Lu. No, he’s not dead. But he does have a concussion. He’s on another table, er, desk. You can’t see him for all the Thins. Nearly half the village has managed to fit in here. Curious, they are. Your Lu said one of those bad men hit him hard on the top of his head with a machine-gun stock. I have him resting. You’re my immediate concern.” He spoke more to the broad-shouldered Thins woman, punctuating his speech with a clacking sound that a few others nearby echoed. “Yes, we’ll deal with their questions shortly, Annja. I want to finish patching you up and make sure you’re cleaned up properly and are strong enough to travel. We need to get you to a real clinic.”

Annja realized most of the mud she’d been wearing had been washed away. She lifted the blanket and dropped it back down. She was naked. Looking over the edge of the table, she saw a wooden bowl filled with muddy water and her pile of mud-caked clothes.

“That would be Som’s work, Annja. I asked her to clean you up a bit. You must have been wearing ten pounds of jungle mud. Som will find you something else to wear.” He paused and leaned close. “You should be in a hospital, actually. A clinic doesn’t have near the facilities. You and Lu and two of those disagreeable fellows—who you took out with a sword, Som tells me—should all be in a hospital. But there are few roads, and they are all flooded, and it’s still raining and dark as pitch outside, so you’ll have to settle for my ministrations at the moment. But we’ll put you and Lu in an ox cart in the morning when hopefully the weather lets up a little bit and we’ll get you to a proper place where people far more skilled than I can look after you. Don’t know what we’ll do with the two disagreeable fellows. The ox cart won’t hold all of you.”

“Listen, Doc, I—” A wave of dizziness washed over her and she slumped back flat onto the table.

“No, you listen. You’re my patient. Much as I’d rather you not be. Much as I’d rather none of you folks were injured in this village. I’m not a medical doctor, Annja. I’m a veterinarian, a retired one at that. Retired to this beautiful country to be left alone and not to be bothered by people shooting at one another.”

“A veterinarian? Retired? I don’t—” Annja finally succumbed to the sedative he’d given her.