Moristotle & Co.: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café

Drinking Kubulis
at the Dead Cat Café

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is the Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.

— 1 —

Erasmus Taft knew damned well he was driving too fast, and he giggled like a stoned teenager. But hey, driving too fast? That’s nothing! How about driving too fast down a steep mountain track no fool would dignify by calling it a road, the pavement so old it had long since broken into loose, rattling chunks? On the wrong side of the “road,” in fact, only not really, because that’s the side they drove on down here. On the wrong side of the car even, but not really, because Dominica was like England, and like England, their cars were built like that too. Even the gearshift was on the wrong side, but only of his big white ass, because it was in the middle as always. It was Ras who was on the wrong side in that case, which made him snicker even more. Oh yeah, and don’t forget the rain exploding on the windshield like you were sitting under a waterfall, which he knew about because he had done it several times since he had come to the island, and you couldn’t see for shit sitting under a waterfall either. He looked over at his half-empty bottle of St. John’s Island rum to make sure it was secure in the seat to his left, strapped into the safety belt of his trusty, rented Suzuki Gran Vitarra, in which everything was on the wrong side including him. Except for the bottle of rum, which was, he thought smugly, right where it belonged.

He strained to understand the heavily accented voice of the man on the scratchy island AM radio over the blasting storm outside the car. Among the fractured English and Kwéyòl – what they called the Creole French patois around here – he distinctly heard the word “hurricane.” Palm trees whipped in the rising wind like manic cheerleaders on meth whose team was winning. Vines and branches flew across the road, slapping at his windows like angry protesters. But he stayed cool; he was in control. He jerked the wheel to miss a refugee goat bounding across the road in front of him and felt a second of pity for its owner; that goat might represent all they had to eat for a week. He came within a palm-frond of the concrete ditch that lined all the roads here, a broken axle waiting to happen. The ditches were everywhere, because, forget hurricanes, on most of this island it rained at least an inch every day. Some places got over four hundred inches of rain a year, more than any place on Earth except the Karst area of Cambodia and Thailand, about which location, thanks to the US government’s involvement in southeast Asia, he knew more than he would have cared to know, given the choice.

He sucked in a huge toke of Salbado’s new weed, green as grass and tasting like fresh horse manure. With his wet fingers and the damp rolling papers, it would barely burn, but damn it was good. He had to admit, this little day trip was turning out to be just about the craziest thing this old Vietnam hippie had ever done, and that, boys and girls, was saying a lot.

He couldn’t believe the weed; the little bastard had been telling the truth. When Salbado kept saying his crop would come in soon, Ras had assumed he meant like his “ship” would come in, like some down-and-out Yankee fifty years ago. He was just dreaming. But on this island, a real crop coming in good meant you were rich. You could own new sneakers, buy a television. You could have a car. Maybe even move to America. He laughed, long and hard, and grabbed the rum bottle for a good pull. Fuck, he wanted to move from America to here. The joint had gone out again, and he had to put the bottle down and try to get his cheap Bic knockoff to spark some flame in the damp air without running off the road.

Salbado had come skipping over the hill just after he’d left Kirk and Rita’s place, where, oddly enough, he had come to get some more weed to hold him over, since it looked like he would be here a few more days. He’d missed his plane out, not due to the storm, but because of 9/11. His friends had obliged him with several of the five-inch joints they smoked here all the time. These were standing to attention in his shirt pocket, minding their own business and perfectly dry. Good regular pot was cheap here, and it was everywhere. There were no rolling papers here shorter than about five inches. These islanders were Rastas, man, what you talkin’ about? It was like every brand of papers he had ever known in the States, each one a close personal friend, had all been busted for steroids, so of course they were hiding here in Dominica in smug if muscular shame, just like him. Well, except for the muscular part. He was still in spectacular shape for a guy his age, people told him so all the time, but compared to what he was like at eighteen, in-country in 1970? He felt like a flabby old man. He was a flabby old man.

He made a promise to himself to edit which of his pictures he would show his mother when he returned to the States, because all those humongous joints they were all waving around in the photos were pretty unmistakable. And she had always thought of his buddy Kirk as such a nice boy. Although she would never see Ras again, his mother would receive his digital camera two years after he disappeared forever, and she would see the huge reefers, and she wouldn’t care. They were unmistakable. She would know what they were, and she wouldn’t care. She would still think Kirk was a nice boy.

What he didn’t want his mother to know

As Ras started back down the hill toward the collection of shanties called Bells, Salbado had appeared to his right and tripped down the streaming clay slope with that light step the hill people owned and that his own flatlander bulk would never master. Ras swung across the road to the side and slid to a stop on the high-quality tires only the cars the tourists rented would ever have on this dirt-poor island. He rolled the electric window down, something else the islanders never had. By then the steady rain had slowed to a simple downpour, what island folk considered a humid afternoon. His smile huge, Salbado looked from under heavy brows with a tilted head.

“Salbado, my son, okay okay, how is it with you?” The tall black youth with his startling green eyes threw his head back and laughed, his perfect ivory teeth shining in the gloom. It was a joke between them. Salbado worked for his friend Kirk, cutting the jungle for twenty dollars US per day, which was five dollars more than the going government rate for cutting jungle along the roads. East Caribbean dollars went nearly three to one for US, and US currency carried a certain glamour as well, especially with the Rastas who sold weed. The lad had often said the aging American, whom he often referred to as “Papa Ras Tafari,” the saint of the Rastafarian movement, should adopt him and take him to live in the States, where, he was assured, the streets were paved with gold. His translucent green plastic jacket showered second-hand rain into the car, to which Ras knew the rental car crew would pay no more attention than Salbado did. Rain to these islanders was like air. The worn remnant of a paper bag appeared from under the cheap raincoat, and Salbado held it inside the truck.

“Did you leave me de boots, Ras Tafari, my American Papa?” Ras lowered his brows in disappointment. In a hurt voice he said, “I told you I would. Did you think I’d lie to you? They’re right on the porch where I said they’d be, and well out of the rain. You should at least start with dry boots, my son, although I have no doubt you will get them wet soon enough.”

“Aha!” Salbado shouted, doing a little dance, his head thrown back and his brilliant teeth shining, while somehow his hands, with the bag, stayed inside the car window. “I knew you would! Here, dis for you, I tol’ you! My crop, it come in.” He dropped what turned out to be no less than a quarter-pound of incredibly fresh, light-green weed in Ras’ lap. Later, Ras would be glad to have it, but at the time he thought he would leave the island within the next day or two, when the current tropical storm abated, and he tried to give most of it back. “Don’t be foolish, man, take it!” Like most of the islanders, Salbado’s English vowels accelerated until his Scottish consonants slammed on the brakes. “Taak eet!” Erasmus patted his arm. “Thank you, my son. I will not forget you.” Salbado’s face grew serious, and he stared hard into the white man’s eyes.

“I don’t see you leavin’ here any time soon, Papa. De spirits, dey tell me you will stay here, dat you will be like a king! But I don’ know what dat mean. Hear my words, Papa. Somet’ing big be hap’nin’ in dis place. You look out for eet. I am worried about you. Maybe, you should have kep’ your nice American boots. But you did not!” His smile returned, lighting up the dreary afternoon. “You keep de weed, I keep de boots!” His smiled disappeared again, like the clouds over the sun. “Drive careful, Papa.” With that, he skittered back up the slope and was gone into the rain.

And there it was. The “young savior,” an old woman on another mountainside had told him about several days ago, in a shithole called Attley, where a disabled girl and her mother had spun him a yarn of literally Biblical proportions, about him being the new king. The young savior would tell him, she had said, on a mountain, in the rain, in a storm. And all that shit about him being Ras Tafari. Salbado meant savior. It was raining. There was a storm coming. He looked up the mountain to where Salbado had disappeared. God damn it, his name was Erasmus Taft. He was suddenly cold, shaking in the moist heat so badly he could barely put the car into gear. Ras stopped just downso, as the locals liked to say, and rolled a big fat doob from Salbado’s gift. He stashed the rest in his purse, along with his passport, ID, and other vital items. He had no way of knowing he would never need them, except for the reefer. He lit up the joint, pulling hard with the flame from the lighter still on to fire the damp weed, and was stunned to cough out a huge cloud of aromatic smoke. His head spun and his eyes lit up. Damn! Not a bad trade for the pair of slightly worn waterproof deerhunters he’d ordered from a sportsman’s catalog. Salbado had lusted after those boots for three weeks, chopping jungle from Kirk’s land in a pair of torn plastic sandals his sister had given him. The locals called these “jellies,” and in fact they looked like they might have been made from gummy bears. They might as well have been toys for children as serious footwear. Ras could hardly stand upright on the muddy, near-vertical slopes upon which Salbado and the other workers labored, cutting back the jungle that seemed to grow faster than men could hack it away, wearing those boots himself. And they were not even really good boots, as far as rich Americans were concerned. He’d left them on Kirk’s porch the morning before. He had expected to land at Miami International by eight that evening, Eastern Standard Time.

He would wear his sneakers on the plane, Reeboks, which cost twice as much as the boots, only mildly smelly blue Concourse walking shorts, and his last semi-clean Guy Harvey T-shirt. He would get a shower at the hotel, buy some new slacks and a button-down shirt at Walmart, and have sushi at that place on North Beach with his sister, Samantha. Samantha Taft, having recently reclaimed the family name from her high-living, lowlife, Palm Beach lawyer ex-husband, was now the chief medical examiner at Miami Metro General Hospital. Samantha would harangue him with her liberal views and chide him for his plodding conservatism. He smoked dope like a fiend, wore his hair long, and sometimes, when he felt especially cocky, was still known to catch a wave or two if the storms drove some real waves over the reefs offshore. What the hell was he thinking, voting for Bush?

He would remind her that he also flew the flag every day of his life for all the guys who never came home at all, or lay rotting, paralyzed, in some shithole VA hospital like the one he’d worked at in Gainesville, while going to the University of Florida after the war. That he gave half his money from the crappy little private investigation business he ran up in Fort Pierce to the veterans’ organizations, the DAV and the PVA. Then he would laugh, hug her, drinking in the wonderful smell of her blazing red hair, and order another large hot sake with an extra cup to put on top to keep it warm. His friend Chuck, a Navy vet who had introduced Ras and his then-wife Tabitha to both sushi and sake, had taught him that trick.

Chuck, of course, was dead. He’d died from one of the interminable infections he’d gotten from passing multitudes of razor-sharp kidney stones while the head of urology at the West Palm VA had claimed he was just an old biker who wanted drugs. That was abysmally stupid; Chuck had had more drugs than a hospital pharmacy. He’d finally begun passing undigested food through his ureter, which the asshole urologist claimed Chuck’s wife, Fran, had sneaked into the urine samples so he could get drugs. Ras had freaked out. He’d originally planned to be a doctor and, while in the pre-med program at his first school, FSU in Tallahassee, had honed his general anatomy to a fine edge. The only way that could happen, he told Chuck, was from a bladder fistula, undoubtedly caused by cuts to the interior of his bladder by the damn kidney stones the VA refused to treat him for. The infection must have breached his small intestine, and the only reason Chuck wasn’t dead already was that that infection had also sealed the hole between the bladder and intestine. Otherwise, with fecal matter loose in the body cavity, he’d have been dead from sepsis in no more than three days, and those days would have been filled with shaking, feverish agony to boot. Ras had seen enough guys buy the dirt farm that way, from gut wounds in the jungle, to know. At his urging, Chuck had gone to the doctors in Vero Beach, who had confirmed his diagnosis and put Chuck in the hospital for emergency surgery that day and saved his life-for the time being. Congressman Mark Foley had come to their aid, and later brought a copy of the scathing report written by the head of surgery for the whole VA to Chuck and Fran’s house in Lakewood Park. Among other things, the report had said a first-year surgery student would have correctly diagnosed the fistula, snidely including the fact that, as he understood it, a small-town private investigator had made the proper diagnosis while the head of urology in West Palm had screwed the pooch. But. But. Chuck was still dead.

— 2 —

That wasn’t so unusual though; Tabitha was dead too. Their two daughters were also dead, all killed by the same meth-head truck driver in a fiery crash on Interstate 95. A lot of people were dead these days. In that vein, ha ha, over sliced sashimi Samantha would tell him about the most interesting corpses she had chopped up lately with those wicked little air saws they used, and all the fascinating things she had discovered about their previous owners. Her partners in crime were Dr. Sawat al-Shibh and Dr. Tian Ngu Nguyen. Collectively she called them the “foreigners at the coroners” and assured him they were at least as callous and brutal as herself, if not more. He had long since determined not to die in Miami.

His problem now was, with the new restrictions after 9/11, he had missed a plane for the first time in his life. There would be no sushi with Samantha at the little place on North Beach where the upscale lesbian couples liked to meet for lunch, which looked like a Steak and Shake that had won the lottery, with the big windows looking out on A1A and the chrome appointments. Not any more, as it turned out; never again in fact, but he had no way of knowing that. Tabitha had always scheduled his infrequent flights, had packed for him, taken care of everything. Told him what to bring, what to leave behind. She was good at it. She had been good at everything. After she and the children died, whenever he traveled in America his travel agent had always told him when to go to the airport. What desk to check in at, what time to be there, what flight number.

Dominica was not America. Even if he’d had the money, Salbado could not have bought those boots in this island. They weren’t here to buy, not for sale, not anywhere. There was no Walmart. There were no travel agents. No one had told him when to go to the airport. He was sitting with his friends, Kirk and Rita, drinking ice-cold Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café, just across the Melville Hall River bridge from the airport, until about an hour before his flight. That had always been enough time before. Before a bunch of asshole towel-heads had driven a couple Boeings into the Twin Towers, and one into the Pentagon for good measure.

The Dead Cat wasn’t really named that, it didn’t have a name, and it wasn’t really a café, except that they served food and the little green-bottled Kubuli beers from a plywood shack a little more substantial than most of the plywood shacks on the island. A white cat skin with a few tan patches, a face, ears and all, was stretched on a crude frame of branches over the bar like something from a psychotic post-apocalyptic fantasy-western novel by Stephen King. It was where Erasmus had first tasted the flavor of the island, on his arrival three weeks earlier.

Door to the Dead Cat Café

You flew a Boeing or maybe an Airbus out of Miami or Fort Lauderdale and landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which looked so much like Miami that he had resolved never to visit. One Miami was more than enough for any sane person. From there you took an American Eagle ATR south for four more hours, a turboprop with room for sixty-six passengers and not a lot of luggage. It was his first experience with weight restrictions since his all-expenses-paid junket to Southeast Asia courtesy of Uncle Sam in 1970. The seats barely escaped classification as medieval torture devices, and he thought Bush should have used them instead of waterboarding; after a few hours he would have admitted to child porn to get out of the god-damned thing. By the time the pilot told them they were approaching Melville Hall International Airport, he was battered by the head-drilling prop blast. Over the intercom the pilot was saying they were passing over the Northern Forest Reserve and Morne Diablotins. His limited French made that out to be “mountain of the little she-devils.” Could that be right? He thought at the time that Dominica might have some interesting history. He forgot all that when he saw the airport.

Kirk had warned him not to freak out when the mountains and palm trees came up past the windows. He’d seen the like in-country, but, after all, he was a Florida boy too, and Kirk knew him for the flatlander he was. He’d said not one fucking thing about Melville Hall International god-damned Airport looking like a run-down YMCA with a patched roof and an aging, elongated parking lot. He’d seen better landing strips at forward fire bases where the gooks and chinks shelled them with mortars every other day. It looked like it was closed, too. Closed or not, the pilot was betting his life on it, which gave Ras some modicum of hope. Kirk had warned him about this too: they had to make a steep turn and descent just over the mountains to land. Not to worry, he said, he’d done it a whole six times now and was still sucking good air.

The youthful jock at the stick must have been an Air Force vet from the Bosnia campaign with PTSD: maybe he thought he was on a strafing run. Did they even do strafing runs anymore? He didn’t know. The engines roared as they dove straight down at the crappy parking lot, checkered with tar lines where cracks had been repaired. The passengers, almost all black, had almost all screamed in fear as well. Ras clenched his teeth. Screaming, he knew, wouldn’t save you. The only other white guy, a long-haired French body-builder with his hot, long-haired French girlfriend, had his face buried in his massive hands, crying like a lost child. The girl looked bored. The mountains and palm trees and banana plantations came up past the windows, the plane levelled off, and they touched down lightly, only bouncing a little. The tar lines went bip-bip, bip-bip under the tires. The passengers took up a cheer, and almost in jest Erasmus joined in. The French girl rolled her eyes. She didn’t cheer.

He stood in line at Customs in his dorky blue shorts and fish-printed Guy Harvey T-shirt, sweating with the rest of the passengers. The heat didn’t faze him; Saigon had been way worse than this. The interior of the airport looked exactly like an airport in a movie about Africa. He expected that any minute Brad Pitt, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio, might walk by, mirrored sunglasses reflecting the scene, in fashionably rolled khaki sleeves with fashionably sweat-stained armpits and too many pockets. They didn’t. It was all black islanders, many looking as flush as rich Americans. They were from other, less mountainous and jungled islands, here in the Caribbean Jungle Paradise for vacation, which proved they most certainly were as flush as any rich American. The snorkeling at Champaign Reef was world-class, as was the hiking to such destinations as the Boiling Lake, Emerald Pool, or Trafalgar Falls. He knew all this, not only from Kirk’s twenty-year travelogue, but also because the posters on the walls said so. Some of the passengers he’d spoken with on the flight, like Kelvin, were native Dominicans returning to visit. Kelvin lived in Austin, Texas, and was coming home to see his mother, Geraldine. Ras had described his buddy Kirk’s place as being “out in the sticks,” or so he’d heard. Kelvin informed him politely that the locals, who pronounced the name of the country Dominica, and called themselves Dominicans, preferred to refer to that as “living in the country.”

He cleared Customs, after hearing a bag of shit from some American clown who’d asked him why he was here and where he was staying. He said he would be staying in Bells and wanted to do some fishing. “Bells!” the guy laughed. “Won’t be doing no fishing in Bells!” He told the loudmouth prick he assumed there were charter boats, which brought another guffaw. “Ha! Charter boats!” He considered stabbing a stiff-finger jab into the guy’s throat but figured killing someone before he even left the airport would probably put a damper on his real mission, and spending his life in some shithole island prison didn’t exactly appeal. Instead, he savored the thought of the look on the jerk’s face when he realized his larynx was crushed and he was choking on blood, and it calmed him somewhat. He walked through the sweating crowd to the open side of the terminal to pick up his luggage. The narrow hall was high and hot, and on the right were a few shops selling fried chicken, sodas, and beers. He bought a beer, his first experience with the excellent little Kubulis in their green bottles with the map of the island on the label. He would learn later that the locals considered the shapely outline of their island like the body of a woman and described her in Kwéyòl as “Wa’itu Kubuli,” “How beautiful is her body.” It was cold and went down as smooth as spring water. He put a dollar on the bar and the smiling black woman with the enormous breasts gave him back two East Caribbean dollars and some coins, all with the picture of the Queen on the front. Elizabeth’s grim visage stared at him from sometime in the 1950’s, he was sure. Her hair was still dark then, her bearing still erect, while today she was a stooped figure hazed in white curls. The chatter of the crowd and the announcements over the intercom blended into an almost-normal airport soundtrack, if you could ignore the island-accented British delivery. The usual luggage conveyors were replicated here in stained plywood, immobile tilted racks where the suitcases were carried out and placed for pickup by muscular, sweating young men in unaccountably crisp blue uniforms. It turned out they had tiny window air conditioners in their back offices running off the government’s electricity, which was probably illegal. Unofficial porters, who were apparently not illegal, swarmed around the luggage like jackals around a dead wildebeest. Erasmus saw his bags and went for them, but too late. A skinny yellow man with sunken eyes snatched his battered possessions and had them on a hand cart in a heartbeat. In keeping with the money, he asked in perfect Queen’s English where the big American would like to go.

“I’m meeting a friend here, and I don’t need any help with my bags,” he said, dragging them from the cart as he spoke. The man stood up next to him as if he wanted to fight. Ras didn’t back down; he stood to his full six feet-three inches and looked down, hard, on the skimpy little high-yellow bastard. No bigger than the usual VC fuck. His eyes told the islander he took no shit. The punk stayed in his face, stayed cocky. “Lunch here costs seven dollars,” he said, defiant. “I need to make a living.” Ras gathered his bags. “You ain’t gonna make it off of me.” Just to the right of the doors to the brilliant sunshine outside, he spied a tiny counter labeled Island Car Rentals, and steered for it through the rippling black crowd like a lucky sailor escaping the Sargasso Sea.

Kirk had tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted on renting a car. “Roger and Cindy use Island Rentals when they visit, and they’re happy,” Rita had told him on the phone. She liked it when visitors rented cars. Then she didn’t have to ride the bus into town to go shopping, which, she said, was a major pain in the ass. He had detected a bit of irritation in her voice, which surprised him; he had thought all was well with his friends in the Island Paradise. Roger and Cindy were some folks in Melbourne, Florida, his and Kirk’s home town, whom he had never met. Undoubtedly, they bought their weed from Kirk too, like half the population of Melbourne had for decades. As far as Erasmus knew, except for a few weeks at a tomato-canning factory in his teens, Kirk had never done anything for a living except sell grass. Police Chief of West Melbourne? Every Saturday night, like clockwork. Mayor of Melbourne Beach? When he wasn’t hitting on the teeny chicks sunning in bikinis on the dunes, ohhh yeah. Due to Rita’s warnings concerning that unknown couples’ visits and their troubles with the regular car they first rented, he wound up with the Gran Vitarra four-wheel instead of some pussy-assed sedan, which in the end turned out to be a very good choice indeed.

— 3 —

Shifting from first to second and back again, he worked his way down the mountain in the blasting rain. Here the road wasn’t steep, but it was a joke, only wide enough for a car and a half on the best day, and quickly washing out in the deluge. Emergent rivers poured from the mountainside to his left, filling the concrete gutters and fanning over the pebbled pavement. The jungle writhed in an ecstasy of water and wind. He passed the mission church, where some American denomination like Quakers or something maintained a few white families, who really, no shit, wore Little House on the Prairie clothes, boys in pants and sleeves and round hats, and girls in gingham dresses with long, braided hair. No white children from the nineteenth century played with the little black kids in Bells today. The majestic traveler’s palm, which stood ten yards high in front of the church, waved its arms in distress, their six-foot leaves shredding in the howling tropical wind. On down by Geoffrey the local reefer man’s house the right-hand half of the road had collapsed down the mountain three months earlier, Geoffrey had told him. There wasn’t much slope here but Bells was so remote, they hadn’t yet been able to get anyone from the government out to fix it. Jungle was growing up in the crumbled area and Erasmus would have figured it had been that way at least a year, but then, he was from Florida. People thought Florida was tropical until they went somewhere that really was.

The Quaker church

He now rattled over this mile of ropy green single-lane hell with the rain like dump-trucks full of broken windshield glass emptying on his head. The wind jerked his little four-wheel around like a pissed-off big brother with two hands full of your shirt. Directly in front of Geoffrey’s quite decent little clapboard house, the road opened up to a generous lane-and-a-quarter but had more potholes than a bombed-out airstrip in Da Nang. He entered this wet minefield in second gear with the rum bottle to his mouth, whipping the wheel back and forth one-handed to narrowly avoid only the most obvious of the myriad watery graves. He bounced over craters he sincerely hoped were not deeper than the distance from his tire treads to his axles. Only the safety harness prevented his head from hammering dents in the roof of the car. He found himself grinning stupidly again, and finally he laughed out loud. He was absolutely determined to make the best of his vacation experience.

He came to the bus stop where the road into Bells met the Marigot highway. He turned right at the stop sign and thought, there was actually a sign, will wonders never cease? He rumbled across the sagging metal bridge over the D’leau Manioc, a tributary of the Layou River. The Layou ran by Bells and past Kirk and Rita’s house. Down the mountain another mile or two, where the road was good and the screaming wind was blocked by the slopes to the east, he came to the sharp, right-left, right-left zig zag that led under a giant banyan tree, whose massive roots were like an integral part of the mountainside. Just past the second left zag, in a clearing on the east side, was a set of buildings called Vena’s Place. Everything about Vena’s was downright fucking odd. To begin with, the sign read:

VENA’S PLACE

A GOOD PLACE

TO SLEEP

DRINK

AND EAT

And that, you had to admit, was downright fucking odd. Sleep, drink, and eat? Shouldn’t it be eat, drink, and sleep? Added to that, it was probably the best sign on the whole damn island, the hell-and-gone-out-in-the-sticks – sorry, the country –and given all that, you’d think they’d have got it right. The place was three wings of three stories each, the long wing facing the road and the two short ones sticking out sideways towards the road so they all faced a central courtyard with a circle driveway and a white marble fountain in the center. It overlooked, from both the front across the road and dropping steeply from the back, a valley known as Fond Zomb. What was really strange was that, when you went past and around it, you could see there were no windows out the backs of any of the wings.

Now, that could be explained away, if you wanted to, by the penchant of the islanders to ignore the wonders of nature to be seen on every side and, for some reason, to focus on the road. From the lowliest tin-roofed shack to the newer, American-style concrete block homes, Dominicans, rich or poor, seemed to be more interested in the sparse traffic on their pitiful roads than the jungle paradise they never got their fill of praising to the few tourists. The first time Ras had been driven by with Kirk at the wheel in the rental and Rita chattering to him from the left front seat, he’d been subjected to what he thought was just their time-honored, stoned, cosmic humor.

Kirk, his best friend since they were eight years old, had met him outside the airport after he’d escaped the little prick who had wanted to hit him up for carting his one suitcase, duffel, and backpack the few yards to the rental car counter. Kirk had held out a bouquet of giant lilies and antheriums he’d cut at his place at Zen Gardens, their name for the bed-and-breakfast he and Rita were building in Bells. After hugging like lost lovers, Erasmus threw his bags in the car and told Kirk to drive, he’d watch and learn. They were on the northeast corner of the island in the town of Melville Hall. Kirk stopped at the first tin-roofed shack past the crappy little bridge over the Melville Hall River out from the so-called “airport.” This turned out to be the loosely-termed non-café café that Ras, seeing the hide of a white cat rather crudely stretched between two driftwood branches over the bar and sensing a lack of leadership in this department, immediately dubbed the Dead Cat. What would you call it? There was nothing else there.

Fading puke-green paint peeled from warped plywood walls, which were punctured here and there with glassless windows. Stout hatches of some thick type of cane, topped with hinges, rose like awnings, held by ropes, which could be let down at night and latched from the inside. It looked like the locals trusted each other no more than the denizens of Fort Pierce, Florida, did; his adopted hometown was a shithole of crime and gangs as bad as any in America. Walking in behind Kirk, Ras entered a dark room full of loud, dark men who went silent at their approach, as sullen as black men can be when you are the only white guys around. He wasn’t afraid of them; he just wasn’t sure of his position. A dozen bad-ass black guys in Fort Pierce could be real trouble. He could probably have laid them all out in the bad old days, but even a few minor casualties, he was positive, would ruin his first vacation in years – and worse, would defeat his real reason for being here in the first place. Kirk paid them not the least mind, stepping up to the bar and ordering two Kubulis and two plates of “provision.” He chose goat for their meat and the provision, he said, was whatever vegetables they had that day. The Kubulis, as at the airport, came from the cooler smoking cold in little green bottles like diminutive Heinekens. He had been prepared to be disappointed with another German-tasting beer, but the one he’d had at the airport had convinced him otherwise. Kubulis were truly awesome beers, clean and smooth and not bitter at all.

The sea breeze blew in from the beach, while the river tumbled to the ocean over rocks where naked black children splashed and shrieked like kids anywhere. Not one of the locals spoke a word. All eyes were on the two white men, the slim, athletic Kirk in his loose shirt and Crocs, and Erasmus, the beefy tourist in the fancy flowered Hawaiian. All he lacked was white socks with his sandals and a camera on a strap. Their plates came up and even the heavy black woman behind the bar eyed the two Americans with suspicion as Kirk picked them up and set them on the table. Ras was almost sure he was in for a boxing match, and maybe a visit to the local jail. Then Kirk leaned over to the three men at the nearest table and, with a big grin, said in a loud voice, “So, how you doin’?”

The entire room was instantly transformed. The nearest man at the table replied heartily that he was doin’ fine, and how about their own selves? Wide smiles all around revealed massive fence-lines of perfect white teeth at every table. Even the bar lady nodded, satisfied. From that point on they had a lively conversation about where they were from, and were they enjoying the beautiful jungle paradise? It seemed like a catchphrase, jungle island, jungle paradise, heaven on Earth. Ras tucked into tasty, tender curried goat, not too hot. It tasted somewhat like the monkey he’d had in Vietnam, only a little darker. The provision was rice, fresh little beets in a bit of salad, and boiled dasheen, a nasty, starchy local root like a giant, hairy potato. The locals loved it, encouraged him to “eat, eet up, mon!” They actually cheered when he choked some down, grinning so he wouldn’t spit it on the floor. He never managed to like dasheen, but from then on, the people of Dominica owned his heart.

They left after several more rounds of Kubulis, paid for by the locals, with many a handshake and slap on the back. Some of the islanders claimed to have heard of Kirk and his wife, the “white people in the bamboo house” in Bells. Whites were rare – rare enough, it seemed, to be the subject of gossip. When they were back on the Marigot Road, headed south to Bells, Ras asked Kirk what the fuck all that had been about.

“The people here went directly from being slaves to being free men in their own country,” he explained. The August after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the islanders finally heard about it, and revolted. It didn’t happen all at once, but through revolution and politics they were finally their own masters and running their own country. “These are the friendliest people you will ever meet, anywhere in the world, but they have plenty of good reasons never to kiss any white man’s ass. But all you have to do is speak first, and they will give you the shirt off their backs. And it may be the only shirt they own.” In time Ras found this to be true. Speak first in a friendly way and Dominicans treated you like gold.

— 4 —

The first time they had gone south into Roseau, the capital, they had passed Vena’s, and Kirk had told him with his closed-mouth smile that vampires lived there. That smile meant either nothing or everything; Kirk might have said that Martians would land on interplanetary unicycles tonight, and that in the morning the sun would rise, and that smile would be there the whole time. When he introduced you to the aliens, he would have sold them some dope, and cadged you a ride with a stoned Martian babe with a nice rack of three green boobs, and off you would go on her space-unicycle, into the rising sun. It turned out that Kirk had good reasons for his conclusions about Vena’s, as psychotic as they seemed at the time; but then again Kirk and Rita were just like that. It was probably why they were married. They were both as crazy as shithouse rats. In fact, Ras had been like that most of his life too. Except for a brief and disastrous intermission in Southeast Asia in the early seventies, he had spent his life as a stoned surfer-freak. Upon his return and subsequent recovery from multiple serious wounds, which, given his innate clumsiness, he had considered inevitable, he had become a small-time private investigator. This eventually provided him with a surprisingly good lifestyle, and the money, as one self-help guru had described it, to support a serious addiction. It wasn’t the drab heroin of the usual Nam loser; they’d given him morphine for his pain, but he’d never really gotten a kick out of that. It wasn’t soapers, or Quaaludes, or even the clinical Methedrine you could get from the jet pilots. Oh, no, what got him going was cocaine. Mexican Marching Powder. Bolivian Badness. Peruvian Pink.

By 1979, he was flying high, with a gorgeous wife, two beautiful baby girls and a nose the size of Nebraska. He and Tabitha had spent the night Hurricane David hit Florida higher than eight hundred Aztecs, partying with friends, including Kirk, in a U-Haul building run by their buddy Steve. The building had started life as a Winn-Dixie grocery store, in the town then known as Eau Gallie. Kirk and Rita would not meet for many years yet, and neither of them knew of the devastation David had wrecked upon the tiny island nation of Dominica; they didn’t even know it existed. What a night that had been! Snorting lines a foot long off a Xerox machine! You hit the button and as the tray moved, you sucked it up to cheers from your friends, who got to whiff whatever you left behind. He and Kirk, along with Freddy and Brian, had gone wandering around during the eye of the storm with their rifles and shotguns, and he had come this close to trying to shoot the antenna off the old drive-in movie screen. Back at the U-Haul building, Brian had been aiming out the double-wide back loading doors and was about to take a shot at that antenna whipping in the wind when something told Erasmus it was time to be cool. He’d developed some kind of second sight in-country, and it was a good thing for Brian that he had. Not three minutes later, a bunch of sheriffs had jumped in front of that doorway with guns drawn, shouting, “Hands up!” Had Brian been aiming that rifle that second, nothing would have kept him from being shot so full of holes his momma wouldn’t have known him. As it was, Ras’ weapons training had saved them: he’d made them all wipe their firearms dry. The cops went over every gun they had, all stacked behind the door, and if there had been a drop of rain on any one of them, they all would have gone to jail. Somebody had seen a bunch of psychos wandering around with guns and, naturally, had called the police. Luckily, the deputies hadn’t gone into Steve’s office, where the coke and weed were laying out for any fool to see.

By 1987, Ras was hanging on to the last tragic tatters of a failing marriage, a struggling business, and two disillusioned pre-teen girls living, against their wills, alone with Dad in a foreclosed house. What really sucked, he thought at the time, was his piece-of-shit wife, who now moralized about coke when she had been right behind him, line for line, the whole time. Now she was living at their dealer’s house, fucking God knew who-all for the same lines she could have gotten at home. He remembered thinking miserably, as he snorted another bolt in his darkened office on Orange Avenue in downtown Fort Pierce, that things could not possibly get any worse. Well well well; as Rod Stewart said, look how wrong you can be.

— 5 —

Byron Clayton Tottenmann drove one of those eighteen-wheeler trucks everyone sees on the interstates and Florida’s Turnpike. Except that his was one of those trucks that carried wrecked cars to the reclamation centers. Crashed cars. Smashed, bashed and trashed cars. Byron had spent time in prison, but really, killing that little girl two doors down had been an accident; he’d been drunk when he ran her over. Everybody knew that. It was why they had let him out way short of the ten he’d been slapped with. That right there, that proved it: if his lawyer hadn’t fucked him he’d have walked. He’d grown up with a father, Lester Clayton, who had lost his first wife in a hurricane in Key West in 1946 and had never really gotten over it. Byron’s half-sister, Porcelain, who was half black, had been much older and had moved away from Miami when he was just a toddler. Anyway, at thirty-two, Byron was tough. The cars shouldn’t have bothered him. But lately, he had taken to looking at them, really looking. It was a bad habit to get into. It made him think about the people who had been in them when they got all crushed and twisted and all.

He’d also taken to snorting the trash that passed for methamphetamine in those days, and gak, as they called it, was a truly bad habit to get into as well. When he sniffed the gak, and looked at the cars, he saw the blood, the hairs, the teeth. He knew he shouldn’t, but the more he tried to ignore them, the more he envisioned the accidents that had produced those horrific, silent testaments to speed and bloody misfortune. It was like one of those twisted, South Beach artsy-fucks had tried to make sculptures depicting the hazards of modern travel. It wasn’t as if Byron was completely uneducated. He’d taken art-appreciation classes in stir. He just thought most of the shit they got paid millions to put in front of City Halls and County Commission buildings all over Dade county looked like monkeys had made it.

He didn’t get cars or trucks or SUV’s with minor damage; the vehicles he carted were totaled. Crushed. Destroyed. Chances were good that the folks who’d been in them at the time they were damaged beyond repair had either gone into a box in the dirt farm or spent a year in the hospital, followed by the sunny prospect of a shiny new wheelchair with matching oxygen tank at the wedding of their former sweetheart to their soon-to-be-ex best friend. Byron couldn’t stop thinking about the crashes. The wrecks. The “accidents,” as some were so fond of calling them. He was beginning to see them full time. Well, full time when he was driving. And doing the gak.

— 6 —

Tabitha Taft was sick and tired of her husband’s shit. He had become such an asshole even she couldn’t stand him, and she loved him. She knew he thought she was a coke whore, but the truth was she had hardly fucked anybody since they’d split, whatever he thought. She had certainly never fucked Commercial Mike, the coke dealer, even though her husband had accused her of it. Like she didn’t know he had banged whiff-sucking bitches right there in Mike’s living room. She could hardly stand to sit on the couch, just thinking about it. That night, when she came to pick up the girls to go visit her mother in Melbourne, the son of a bitch hadn’t even come home yet. He was probably, she thought bitterly, snorting blow in his office downtown with the lights off. She was short with the girls, and by the time she got them buckled in to the back seat of her 1985 Plymouth she was sorry. It wasn’t their fault. They were caught between two flawed and addicted parents, and she wanted to tell them they hadn’t done anything wrong. But she forgot to say so, because she’d done a few lines before picking them up. She never got a chance to say anything to them after that.

Byron too had been acting erratically for days, and he knew it. He’d done his best to hide it from his supervisors, making sure to fill out all of his paperwork properly so as not to call attention to himself. The gak helped with that, allowing him to stay awake while he ploughed through it all. But his night-time runs had become more and more like waking nightmares. As he drove through the darkness, he saw a detailed procession of the gory demise of each of his mangled vehicular passengers, particles of whom were often left in the vehicles themselves. The vehicles were supposed to be cleaned thoroughly, but often it just wasn’t possible to get all of the blood and tissue out of them. And the guys doing the cleaning were just like him, working stiffs with their own problems and demons and addictions. He’d been whiffing more gak to try to kill those images. In spite of this, he continued to see before him, in the reflection of his own windshield, the blue Chevrolet as the woman who hit the fireplug flew through her windshield, her face shattering into a mass of screaming red death as the glass scattered onto the road. He saw the white Ford pickup rolling over the surprised high-school cowboy thrown halfway out the driver’s window, his guts shooting from his mouth while the top half of his slim young body separated from the lower half. He saw the silver Saturn going under the eighteen-wheel highboy, taking off the heads of the nice man, his wife, and his two teenage sons along with the car’s roof. The body of their golden Retriever was still in the car, stuck under the front seat breeding flies. How could the cleaning crew have missed that? That car was still so full of blood that when it had rained somewhere between Boca Raton and Jupiter, some red-brown horror had leaked down onto the Hunter-green Jag. Byron had noticed it while fueling up at the Fort Pierce truck plaza and had tried to wash it off with the service hose. And the Jag! He laughed wildly as he thought about it, his grin looking like a scream in his rearview as he shifted gears, going up an overpass, riding north on the meth. Nice thing, driving a truck in Florida, no hills to worry about. At about ninety, the Jag had wrapped itself around a power pole on the passenger side, uniting the honeymooning couple inside in a bloody, soupy embrace that would last throughout eternity. It had taken a tow truck on one end and a fire-department ladder truck on the other to straighten it out enough to forklift it onto the bottom rear cradle of his transport. Coming down the overpass bridge, Byron began to cry.

He turned up his stereo. This rig had an awesome boomer, a CD player, and nine speakers. Pink Floyd was raging, “Run Like Hell,” the guitar echoing, the voices on reverb, and when they sang “Ah, ah, ah, ah” over and over, he saw the wrecks. Blue waves seemed to be coming at Byron through the air, the high sodium lamps at the next interchange were pulsing in time to the music, he was crying, and he was pushing the pedal down to the floor. He didn’t know why he was crying, why he was flying over 100 miles an hour in a huge rig, but then, he didn’t know much these days and he just couldn’t stop. He couldn’t stop the tears running down his face and he couldn’t stop the horrific images of highway carnage in his head and he couldn’t stop the truck. He was seeing the crashes again, and they were all running together, so that after each “Ah!” by Floyd there was a wreck, a bad one, then another, and another. Heads went through roofs, babies through windshields, lovely wives were tossed onto the unforgiving pavement and then driven over by horrified husbands in their own cars. “Ah!” Bam! “Ah!” Crunch! “Ah!” Boom! “Ah!” Wham!! Bones crackled, brains splattered, blood flew in scarlet rainbows of gore. Retirees in Cadillacs were crushed under citrus trucks driven by illegal aliens. Children were squashed beyond recognition by drunk drivers. Pregnant mothers were eviscerated by falling highway signs, unborn fetuses spread like strawberry jam across uncaring lanes of speeding, heedless traffic. He made up new sounds to go with the twisting metal, the shattering glass, the broken, helpless humanity. “Ah!” Spish! “Ah!” Doosh! “Ah!” Bawang! “Ah!” Booyah! Byron was laughing now, while he cried and drove his foot against the pedal so hard he had to hold himself down with the steering wheel.

Tabitha Taft was just driving slowly onto I-95 from the on-ramp at Indrio Road when Byron hit the top of the overpass at just over one hundred twenty miles per hour. He didn’t even see the Plymouth carrying the woman, high on cocaine, and the two sleepy children, or the tour bus she was following. He was standing over the wheel, jamming his foot on the accelerator, not even looking at the road. When he hit the trunk of Tabitha’s car, the front of the eighteen-wheeler full of wrecked autos actually left the ground. It came crashing down on top of Ras’ family, mashing them flat in a messy stew of blood, glass, flesh, steel, vinyl, and diesel fuel. The shredded body of Byron Clayton Tottenmann was blasted through the windshield and fiberglass of the cab, landing in a bloody, twitching mess atop the Transtar tour bus as it traveled north.

A cast of destroyed vehicles were joined in a stage production of death, screaming down the highway shooting fountains of sparks, exploding into the crowded bus ahead of them. Already-battered cars, their drivers and passengers among the recently dead, tumbled away in independent directions, showering fragmentation grenades of sheet metal and broken steel chain. A tan GM pickup, already responsible for the deaths of a wealthy Pahokee farmer and his cancer-stricken wife, crushed Jasper Rufus Johnson and his eight-year-old daughter, Lottie Jane, to death in his brown Taurus. They had been going to visit his ex-wife, Porcelain Jones – Byron’s half-sister – in Orlando. Byron had just killed his own niece, but he would never know it. Porcelain would miss Lottie Jane; she had been named for Porcelain’s mother’s best friend back in Key West, before she had died in a hurricane.

A drab white Volvo station wagon, with a bloody head-print pushed out from the front glass, ploughed its solid, safe front end through the windshield of a minivan full of jubilant cheerleaders on their way back to Port Saint Lucie after watching their team kick ass all over the Merritt Island Mustangs, one of the toughest teams on the Florida High School circuit. The entire squad, including the stunningly beautiful coach, driver, and senior English teacher, Mrs. Jeanette Hamilton, were destroyed, instantly transformed from human beings into blood and bone and filth.

Jeanette Hamilton’s husband, Jack, was her High School sweetheart, Boy’s Dean at the school, and coach of the track team. He had just been listening to a personal message on their new home answering machine from his wife’s seventeen-year-old female lover, one of the girls on the cheerleading squad, when the phone rang. He answered in a flat monotone. The girl had referred to something his wife had said about him grunting when they made love. Grunting. Like a pig. The girl had laughed and told his wife to make sure to erase the message before her husband got home. The officer on the line was sorry to tell him some bad news, which, for Jack, was essentially that both his wife and her under-age lover were corpses. Jack spoke to the sorrowful officer in a neutral voice, thanked him for calling, and, when the officer asked if Jack would need someone to come talk with him about it, declined. The officer was still talking when Jack set the telephone on the cradle (the phone they had whispered love-talk on? the phone they had made fun of his grunting on?). The phone rang again, it rang and rang. The machine, in their ridiculous laughing voices, happy voices, said, “It’s Jack’n’Jean, leave a message!” Someone began to talk on the message machine. Whoever it was sounded very serious.

Jack didn’t answer. He walked into the den and opened the bottom drawer, where he kept his grandfather’s US Army model 1911 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol and put it in his mouth. He wondered if it still worked, if there was a round in the chamber, if the gun was loaded at all. His grandfather’s pistol had killed many a Nazi in the war, and it didn’t let Jack down now.

The brand-new, now-totaled Ford Explorer above Byron’s cab, right in the front spot, broke loose and flipped over onto the rear roof of the bus. It instantly crushed dozens of elderly Jewish northerners on their way home from the Florida vacation of a lifetime. At some point, the investigators said later, the whole truck-car-bus conglomeration caught fire. Only six people made it off the bus. The driver, Herkimer A. (Morty) Mortenson of Poughkeepsie, New York, died of smoke inhalation, having gone back inside the burning bus trying to save what he thought was an injured passenger. Someone seemed to be calling for help. It turned out to have been a miniature poodle owned by Sarah Gideon Meir, a distant relative of Golda Meir, former Prime Minister of Israel, and just now deceased in a burning bus in Florida. She had hidden the dog in a large purse made of plastic grocery bags, all twisted and knitted together into a carry-all intended to save the environment. The poodle didn’t make it either. It was found, thoroughly roasted, encased in a coat of charred plastic.

— 7 —

When he first arrived, Ras played the tourist. Driven by Kirk and Rita in his own rental car, he visited the sights and attractions offered by Dominica, the Jungle Paradise. And slowly he learned to drive on the left side of the road. The Emerald Pool was a favorite site, where adventurers hiked through the rain forest to a cave with a waterfall flowing over the entrance into a gorgeous pool, hence the name. They visited Wotten Waven, pronounced, he was told, like “Rotten Raven,” and ate curried goat at the River Rock Café while enjoying another unparalleled jungle valley. Rita, who liked to paint rocks, had made a rock painting as a sign for the restaurant. They went for lunch at Tia’s Bamboo Cottages and soaked in his natural hot-springs swimming pool. They passed Vena’s Place often, and the vampires joke came up again and again. There were no windows on the back and sides of those three buildings. Behind the hotel the land dropped away to the southeast into a heavily forested valley the locals called “Fond Zomb.” In French patois it translated as “zombie flats.” They rarely saw anyone outside, only once in a while a group or family unloading luggage from nice cars or private transports. Kirk said the vampires fed on these guests, and then dumped their cars down the hill behind the building.

Then again, Kirk and Rita were just like that. They also said the house way up the hill past the Belgian villa on the road to Roseau was where Osama bin Laden had lived. Eventually, Saddam Hussein had come to stay there too. When Ras pointed out that his own country had hanged Hussein, Kirk turned to look over his shoulder. Ras’ eyebrows went high in alarm; both Kirk and Rita ignored the plunging cliff to their left to shoot glares of sarcastic pity back at him. “You know how many doubles he had?” Kirk asked. “Bush used him to get their oil and then they hung some poor clown in his place.” Ras considered telling them the plain truth that, while the original deal had in fact been for Iraq to pay the US in oil for freeing them from this tyrant, that had never happened, but instead he just muttered, “Hanged. The word is hanged.” “What?” they asked, in unison. “Nothing,” Ras sighed, waving a hand in surrender from the back seat.

The wall of the Belgian Villa

To his everlasting irritation, Rita had owned the nerve to tell him he was naïve for believing in the American system of government. At the time she had been avidly devouring a novel by a woman who claimed to have knowledge of a distant world, the inhabitants of which were in possession of transcendent wisdom. The planet in question was in the same orbit as Earth, but in direct opposition, so of course had never been discovered by scientists. This was oddly reminiscent of a set of novels by John Norman he remembered reading as a kid, about a similar planet called Gor, which, he imagined, the author might have found in his big brother’s bottom drawer, along with his Playboy magazines. This trove of enlightenment, transcendent or not, was supposedly relevant to the everyday lives of the depressed, frustrated, overweight wives of assuredly less-than-transcendent insurance salesmen, lawyers and pest-control operators. The back cover of the novel Rita was reading sported a picture of the kind of vacant, overly made-up bozo-babe Ras might look for late at night, hanging drunkenly over spilled cocktails in the classier hotel bars. Sometimes they were the wives of his clients, who had hired him to find out who they were screwing on the side. Sometimes they were the client, looking for evidence of infidelity so they could take their husband to the cleaners in the impending divorce. Ras called these women “leaners,” and they were usually good for a quick shot of pussy in the elevator, or maybe an entire night of guilty debauchery, after which they had to go jump in the hotel pool to hide the evidence from an equally hammered (and equally guilty) husband. The text under the picture assured the breathless reader that the information contained in this astounding book by the above semi-blonde leaner was unquestionably true, having been gleaned from over four hundred hours of “channeling” of an actual alien, from that distant planet, by none other than the author herself! And he, of course, was naïve for having a bit of faith in George W. Bush. Maybe so, he thought ruefully; maybe so.

At a party back in Melbourne, at Kirk’s old house, Kirk had once claimed that Bush was a lizard-man, and a shape-changer. Kelly, a big horsey guy who acted dumb but was definitely not, laid a classic one on him. After an heroic toke on the joint going around, Kelly raised an eyebrow. “Bush is a shape-changer?” “Yeah,” replied Kirk. “Well,” Kelly asked, “why the hell did he pick the one he’s got now?” The idea of anyone, even an alien lizard-being, actually choosing to look like George W. Bush was so ludicrous Ras had to turn around and walk away, his face flaming red as he brayed in stoned laughter.

Then there were the chem-trails. According to Kirk and Rita, the government put chemicals into the fuel of commercial jets, which made people angry and confrontational in the States. The short trails, Kirk explained professionally, were the normal ones, but the long, extended “horse tails” were the ones that contained the bad chemicals. Being off the major flight routes, Dominica was not subject to these chemical influences; this was the reason, he said with a straight face, why everyone here is so nice. Erasmus wondered if living in paradise might not explain it, but he thought better of saying so at the time.

He’d searched the internet for chem-trails, as Rita had suggested, and found some very interesting information indeed. There was a professional-looking article on how to avoid the deleterious effects of the chemicals, somewhat like the vizqueen and duct-taped windows scenarios to survive chemical attacks, which were published by the Bush administration after September 11 and roundly ridiculed by the leftist media. Typical, he considered. If it’s your own government attacking you, it makes sense to CNN, but if someone else is attacking you, it’s silly. And wouldn’t that, he thought, just go over great with the neighbors! Your personal introduction to Florida’s Baker Act, where no less than three, count ’em, three psychiatrists got to examine your head and spin the wheel to decide if you got the two-week brain spa or the full ninety-day Mental Makeover!

There was another article, not quite so glossy, by a Buddhist, that discussed “generators” (of what was not specified) capable of “clearing the skies of chem-trails within minutes,” for a mere eight hundred dollars each. For best effect, he recommended two of these generators. To the author’s dubious credit, Ras had to admit, the whacko did say he felt that he was personally capable of clearing the atmosphere with the power of his mind alone, by “projecting his chakras into the skies.” So, if one was just psychotic enough, as in crazy as a shithouse rat, and willing to ignore high-level winds and other natural phenomena, the sixteen hundred smackers for the generators might not really be necessary. He considered with a grin that he would like to meet someone with that kind of manic brass, but then again, he had known one all his life: Kirk. Guys like him made the world an interesting place.

After the war Ras had worked in a psychiatric ward where the aides had joked about some nut case yelling there was “smoothie gas coming from the ceiling.” If only it were true. The fixtures on the ceiling were speakers for the intercom and fire alarm system. But really, the last thing you wanted to do was stir up the natives. They wouldn’t even let their “clients” on the ward drink coffee or watch The Exorcist on HBO. He asked Kirk, if the government wanted to control people, wouldn’t it be better to put sedatives in the jet fuel to make everybody happy and compliant, rather than stimulants to make them grumpy and uncooperative? In fact, since the normal condition of most people was grumpy and uncooperative in the first place, why would they bother? Kirk didn’t have an answer for that one.

— 8 —

It wasn’t until the tenth day he was on the island that Ras finally broached the subject of why he had really come, besides that he needed a break from trying to find a reason to live each successive day. He had spent nine nights in the little concrete house up by the road, listening to the bats come rattling into the rafters before every rain. And those rains! He was a Florida boy, who the hell you think you’re talking to? He had spent eighteen months in-country in Vietnam, which was no stranger to deluvian weather either. He’d thought he knew all about rain, but damned if this wasn’t another thing entirely. The mountains, even thirteen hundred feet above sea level, peaked and ridged all around them, gathering the clouds to themselves and drinking in the deluges that amounted to as much as four hundred inches a year. Away to the northwest, on the ridge called Donkey Back, was a majestic Royal palm tree Kirk had named King Palm. The clouds would sweep in from that direction and by the time King Palm was no longer visible, the crashing of the downpour would be rushing towards them through the jungle, battering the banana leaves and pounding on the tin roofs like an army of pissed-off Scotsmen. It rained more than an inch a day, sometimes so hard you couldn’t hear each other talk for the noise. The air was cleaner than anywhere he had ever experienced. The Nam might have been comparable had it not been at war, but it was always polluted by the stink of diesel fumes, gasoline, and jet exhaust. Stinking, unwashed young men, rotting garbage, fly-blown corpses, and maggot-infested latrines. But here he didn’t need his inhalers for lungs poisoned by tobacco, weed, napalm, and Agent Orange. Soon he didn’t need his nose spray either. His sinuses were clearer than they had been since he had started snorting coke, God, how many years ago now? Whatever dust there was, and certainly the rain of pollen from the burgeoning rainforest, were washed away daily by the short but devastating downpours as surely as the blood of Christ washed away the sins of the world.

After sunset there were the “meeting-lizards” and the clack-clacks. The meeting-lizards, as Ras named them, sounded just like the guy at meetings who taps his spoon against a glass to call the meeting to order. Ding ding ding! It was like a tiny bell ringing out clearly in the groaning, creaking jungle darkness. Clack-clacks were like giant grasshoppers with eyes that glowed bright florescent green like the headlights on the toy Hess trucks he’d gotten for Christmas as a child. They would hover in through the open windows like tiny helicopters, eventually landing upside-down on the ceiling. Then they would shut off the headlights and turn on an incredible tail-torch of the same Halloween glow-stick green while they wandered around among the rafters. He had at times been able to read by the light, it was that bright.

That morning he sat with Kirk and Rita on the porch of the bamboo house for coffee, as usual. The bamboo house sat well down from the road, by the river, and was totally unlike most Dominican houses in that it did not face the road. Dominicans seemed bored with the eternal beauty of the forest and river valleys and even the beach. Each house, and even every drinking joint, faced the road, just like at Vena’s. The locals wanted to see what was going on, who was going by. The coffee was exceptionally good. Ras sucked up caffeine like the usual recovering addict and smoked weed like the hollow-eyed attendees of AA meetings smoked cigarettes. He had given up tobacco some time back, and his lungs were too wrecked for him to even consider taking it up again. What breath he had left he had dedicated to smoking pot. Reefer at least left him room to breathe.

The porch looked out on the little branch of the Layou River, called the Dl’eau Manioc, hovered over by calabash and cacao trees, smooth brown boulders the size of small houses forming pools and little waterfalls here and there. Kirk had painted pictures of white herons on some of the boulders, the kind of bird they were used to seeing in Florida. The hills rose on the other side of the stream, layer upon layer of bananas and jungle, and then layer after layer of hills, fading into the distance and the haze of moisture that softened the outlines of every tree and mountain. Kirk had been eight years old and Erasmus seven, when Kirk had first come down the street on his bicycle and sold him firecrackers. He obtained them on his family’s yearly trips to North Carolina and sold them for a profit when he got home. They had been illegal in Florida since before they were born, and Kirk hid them from the cops in the headlight of his Schwinn. It was a scheme that was to serve them well for the rest of their lives. Seven years later, Ras introduced the young entrepreneur Kirk to marijuana, which he had stolen from his older brother, Kenny. At fifteen and sixteen they sold their first bag of weed to some surfers at a place called the Pines, just north of the boardwalk in Indialantic.

Now passing a morning joint of the usual epic proportions, Ras couldn’t help but reflect on how their lives had diverged. First, he’d been drafted and gone to the war, returning home a year and a half later with lifelong injuries that afforded him some small compensation from the VA, and not much else. He’d gone to college and studied psychology, gotten dead-end jobs in construction, psych hospitals, and halfway houses, and worked like a dog to get what he had. Kirk had never really worked a day in his life. He had continued to sell pot and was so successful, it had eventually paid for rental houses and commercial buildings. Hell, he had bought the building where their childhood doctor, Doctor Crandall, had maintained his office since they were kids. Now he lived in Dominica and was buying land there, too.

“Do you remember my Uncle Charlie?” Ras asked. “The one who went to Korea? He came here a few years ago.” Ras couldn’t be sure, but he knew Kirk well, and could have sworn he hesitated for just a heartbeat. “I remember hearing about him, but I wasn’t living here at the time, just visiting. They wouldn’t let you stay more than six weeks, and you couldn’t even get off the plane if you didn’t have a ticket out. Unless you married an island girl.” It was true, and that was just what Charlie had done. Kirk had been instrumental in gaining privileges for foreigners on the island; when he’d first come, you couldn’t own land unless you were married to a local. That had changed. Now you could own two acres per person. Kirk owned two in his own name, two in Rita’s, and two more in his father’s name. He was negotiating for another acre just south toward the village in his sister Eileen’s name. He had never played by the rules, and he wasn’t starting now.

“Well, Mom and my brothers have been asking about him again, and I thought, you living here and all, I could come and ask around about him. Last I heard he was living in a place called Attley.” And there it was again, that slight hesitation. Kirk wasn’t by nature a dishonest man, quite the opposite, and did not lie or hide anything well, unless it involved the police. Ras had been in the intelligence-gathering business in the war, which had eventually led him into the private-investigation game, the only occupation that had ever made him any real money.

Kirk rubbed his mouth, as if thinking, a sure “tell” he was hiding his real thoughts. “I’ve never been there, but I know where it is. You go down to Pont Casse, and make sure to go left at the traffic circle, not right.” They all laughed, remembering his first near-disastrous attempt at driving on the left side of the road. He had gone around the circle to the right, and all the locals waiting for buses at the intersection, even the cops at the tiny station, had stood and clapped at the tourist going the wrong way. “Then you head up the last left,” which would have been the first right in the US, “past Brantridge Estate to Point Lolo. Keep going, and directly across from Layou Park Estate, you’ll see the road to Attley.” Kirk sipped his coffee, the excellent Bello brand, which they ground fresh every day, and passed their breakfast joint to Rita. She too was acting strangely; unusually quiet, not at all her normally outspoken and even belligerent self.

The mountains of Attley

“But I warn ya,” Kirk went on, “you’ll get lost in there. There’s ten or fifteen dead-end roads before you get to the real dead end, at the top of the mountain in Attley. You go through Neiba Estate, Gould Estate, then Crown and Tiperie, all the time zig-zagging around Mourne Couronna. Attley’s at the asshole of Dominica. It backs up on Fond Zomb.” This weirdly-named area, “zombie flats,” was strangely enough the same flats upon which the windowless rear of Vena’s Place looked, or in this case did not look. And that, stoned or not, was downright, you know. Odd. Fucking odd. And for a guy who claimed never to have been to Attley, Kirk seemed to know an awful lot about the area, and that was fucking odd too.

Ras had learned a little something about Attley himself, through his investigations before he had left the States. There had been a series of messy murders there about the time Charlie had come to the island, and in a place as small as Dominica it had been a huge scandal. This was about twenty-five years ago, just before Hurricane David had devastated the island, and along with a lot of other people, Uncle Charlie and his black wife had disappeared. Letters to Ras’ mother, Zoe, from her wayward older brother had become scanty and incoherent in the months before the storm. After the disaster, answers to her inquiries as to his fate had been slow to come and slim pickings to say the least. The Dominican authorities claimed to have too many of their own people missing and dead to worry about some errant white man and refused to offer any further information.

Charlie had been one of the very few white people on the island at the time. He’d taken the only route to residence then open to an outsider and married a Dominican girl a third his age. He’d met her in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. The girl was very black and very exotic, and in 1975 in Melbourne, Florida, that had been a huge scandal too. Some of his old informants, people who’d been in the life back then, said they only saw her after dark. They all figured she was just another coke freak who slept until five and only came out after dark. Oh right, like they weren’t. He knew; he’d been one of them too.

They lived in Melbourne for a while, then they moved to Dominica. Charlie had told Ras’ mother his wife had a house in Attley, and her uncle, who lived in the house, had died. She was afraid that if she didn’t go back and claim it, either someone from the village would squat there or her own family would steal it from her. She brought him to her house, at the top of the remote jungle mountain, and within one year she died of some unknown illness. Charlie had lived in her house on the hill, which looked over the far side of Fond Zomb from Vena’s Place. He spent his next few months drinking rum and writing letters to Zoe in Florida. His fondness for alcohol, for which he was famous and which had undoubtedly gotten him into this situation, had turned into a solid addiction to the local rum. Dominica’s home-made “bush rum” was clean but devastatingly powerful. He wrote that his hair was falling out. His skin was turning blotchy. Reading the actual letters, one got the impression of a guy drinking himself into an early grave who just didn’t get it. Of course his damn hair was falling out. He was in his sixties and easily supported five local families with his rum purchases, and bush rum was cheap! He knew. He’d been one too.

Mom worried her brother was spending his money unwisely. Ras thought that was the least of his problems. Uncle Charlie had plenty of money. That money, in fact, was part of why Ras was here, and no small part of how. Charlie had regularly sent money to his sister. She had a fair bit of money too, and hadn’t spent it, until she asked him to come to this island and find out what had happened to her brother. She’d seen to it he had all he needed.

The thing was, Ras’ aunts, Ruby and Flo, had gotten Charlie declared dead, against his mother’s wishes. Charlie’s other sisters wanted the money, but when the will was read it had backfired on them. Ruby and Flo got saddled with Charlie’s junky little 1940s house off Babcock Street in old Eau Gallie. All the money went to Zoe. And all she wanted to do with it was to find her big brother, or find out what had happened to him.

Enter the loser son who’d snorted a successful private investigation company up his nose, while his family had been turned into char-broiled highway burgers. He’d literally been whiffing cocaine when they were being killed. The bodies were so burned, they had to put sandbags in the girl’s little coffins to make it look like there was something in them. The funeral director, his good friend Ray Hobbes, hadn’t really wanted to tell him about it, but Ras had pressed him. There was no real weight to the remains. The sandbags, he reluctantly revealed, made it believable at all that their roasted little bodies were in there.

After their deaths Ras had sold his business and drifted, doing the odd cheating-spouse or greedy-business-partner investigation. He lived like a hermit and spent his money sparingly. He rented half a tiny asphalt-shingle duplex in downtown Fort Pierce, the place, it was said, where crack cocaine had been invented. Surrounded by threatening, rundown three-story apartments, part of the city housing project, it had long ago surrendered to anonymity. You had to take two turns of the yellow sand track after you cut through the parking lot of the Nowalk Hotel, or worse, come in through the parking lot of the Project apartments. Either way, you had better wear shoes, against all the needles and used condoms littering the sun-blasted sandspurs and broken glass. Either way could be worth your life, especially for an aging white nobody who used to be bad but was now just a pathetic remnant of brighter days.

He liked it because his neighbors were no more interested in calling attention to themselves than he was. Even the bikers snorting gak in the other half of the dupe kept it down. It was right downtown, off US 1 and Delaware Avenue, not three blocks from where they parked the black-and-white cruisers. And, biker or not, you did not want to cross the Fort Pierce Police Department, no you did not. Occasionally some altercation at the Nowalk would bring the FPD, usually between a hooker and her john. The joke was it was “no walk” from any of the local joints, Frankie and Johnnies’ or The Bourgeois Saloon, if you picked up a working girl; it was right on the corner. No walk at all to get laid. They apparently rented rooms by the half-hour. So of course, these little trysts now and then went south, and there would be screaming, and the black-and-white cars would show up, and it would be just like an episode on COPS. There would be whores crying, suspects hiding their faces, and law enforcement officers being their usual, steady, reasonable, and often humorous selves. But on the bad nights they would have to play rough, and downtown had lots of bad nights in the early days of the twenty-first century.

This led to some fine late-night entertainment for a guy watching from the dark of his little porch. The heavy metal from next door was so muted and pleasant it sounded like Christmas carols. He would sit watching with a beer in his hand, maybe a joint, but less and less these days did he have a head full of coke. After years of crying and calling himself an asshole, he was thoroughly tired of cocaine and missed sleep. He finally just quit doing it. He woke up one morning relatively sober, having done no blow in weeks and just now realizing how good he felt. He had a day or so to try to figure out what to do next when Zoe called. She wanted him to come visit his mother. She needed him for a job.

This had never happened before. Ras had done his level best to insulate his mother from the seedier side of his occupation, but she knew. Yet she had perfect faith in his honorable intentions, his innate goodness, even when he was trashing his family and his business in a losing battle. He fought an enemy who forced you to finance her war efforts, to seek her out and do battle at your own expense. When Kirk had quit years ago, he had said cocaine was a whore, and she always stole your wallet. His surprise at Mom engaging him was next to nothing when she revealed what she wanted him to do, where she wanted him to go. An island called Dominica.

In some inexplicable twist in the fabric of any rational universe, that loser of a son, Ras, his humble self, had a lifelong friend who had chosen Dominica from a map as the place he wanted to live out his life. Kirk had made his decision twenty-five years ago, right after Hurricane David, which he had spent partying with the rest of them in the U-Haul building. He spent the better part of the next ten years trying to establish some right to stay on the island more than six weeks. He was nothing if not determined. He often repeated his mantra when he was back in Melbourne. “Dominica is ninety-five percent jungle and mountains. It has no dangerous animals, no poisonous snakes, and few biting insects. It has no army, no navy, a weak government, and a nearly non-existent police force. Weed is plentiful and cheap. This adds up to paradise, my friend; think about it.” Until that call from his mother, Ras had never considered it. He would what? Run off to some tropical island and live happily ever after? Find out it was some third-world dump and slink back home? But now, he had a job, and he would do anything for his employer, anything. And he had money. The kind of money he’d had when he’d first started moving coke, when he was on top of it, instead of the other way around. He felt really shitty, calling his buddy and feeding him a line of bull about getting an inheritance and just wanting to visit, see the island for himself. Kirk had been overjoyed at the prospect. Come anytime, he said. Stay for free, as long as you like. Ras felt worse.

— 9 —

He slept so well on the island it was hard to get up and going early, but the next dawn found him well on his way to Attley. He knew the few actual miles traversed meant nothing here; the mountains and the roads on them were so exquisitely twisted, one might drive an hour or more to reach a spot one could see across the valley from where one started. He needed time on the ground, to do what they had called recon, back in another jungle.

It was a Wednesday, and the workers were out harvesting bananas. Thursday was “banana day” in town, when all the farmers brought their produce down to the harbor to see if they could sell it, and if there would be a ship that day. If there was, the capital town of Roseau would be like a carnival all day and night, or so he had been told. The previous Thursday they had been in town, and there had been no ship. Not only that, but the local vendors weren’t buying much, and the little “huckster” boats, the tiny, gayly painted inter-island skiffs and schooners, had mostly been diverted by a storm. Many of the farmers had dumped their bananas and dasheen and breadfruit off the docks into the harbor waters in protest, but the only ones to witness it were the beggars and the beach drunks, who got maybe their only bath of the season wading out to drag this floating bounty back in. These intrepid swimmers and a gathering crowd of local folks from the beachside bars proceeded, with early rum-fueled clumsiness, to fight over this free, if salty, treasure from the sea, until beggars and groceries both were thoroughly covered in sand. An occasional streak of blood from a nose or eye accented the struggling mass of staggering, drunken humanity. Had the poor abandoned vegetables been aware, they could hardly have been less outraged, Ras thought, than the slovenly drunks and addicts who swaggered threateningly above them, there on the morning beach. What had they done, excepting to grow and be fruitful as they should, to deserve such shabby treatment?

The procession of ragged, empty-eyed black men slumped in the back of ragged, empty pickup trucks – what they called “transports” – took on the air of a funeral, winding back up the mountain. On the way out of town Ras got his first glimpse of the man in the cave. North of Roseau, on the beach road, were some cliffs, with a shallow impression of a cave and a tiny waterfall, where and old drunk lived with his continuous little fire and his jug of rum, just on the other side of the only guard rail Ras had seen on the island.

That guard rail had featured in a magazine he’d picked up in the airport from Africa – Zimbabwe, if he wasn’t mistaken – and he wasn’t. In spite of his drugged abuse of it, Ras’ mind still worked surprisingly well, and the story he’d read was by some fluff-headed government news babe, gushing the party line about how the progressive people of little Dominica were building their very own “fine new roads, completely free of potholes.” The only roads the visitors from Africa had seen, it was clear, was the beach highway south from Roseau to the Governor’s Mansion. This road was a perfect replica of an American four-lane highway, with yellow lines in the middle, white lines on the outsides, and guard rails – just like in the bad old USA – on both sides. This same road extended north from the city limits just five hundred meters past the old man’s cave and then died a sudden and frightening death, from the usual cholesterol of greed and corruption that clog the arteries of all government funding. From there on, the road was the usual potholed, switch-backed horror common to the rest of the island.

Today he noticed the dozens of “boxing sheds” along the roads, what he thought of as banana shacks. Usually deserted, they were now complicated darknesses filled, brimming, with squirming locals dipping bananas. The stuffy English term “boxing shed” dignified these corrugated tin shelters far beyond their humble reality. They were where a significant portion of the island’s men and women exposed themselves weekly to powerful fungicides into which they dipped the bananas, in the hope this crop would find a buyer. Ras’ first visit to one of these primitive workhouses had horrified him. On its wall was displayed a poster with pictures of a white guy. His bland, Leggo-Man features made it abundantly clear why they thought all white people looked the same. The white guy was wearing a hat, a double-filter breathing mask, goggles, a long-sleeved shirt, rubber gloves, long pants, and rubber boots. He was shown in a variety of poses one might expect a banana worker might assume, if one were a white guy in America who knew nothing about harvesting bananas. He injected the roots of banana trees with fungicide; he sprayed the leaves with pesticide; he carried the resultant toxin-soaked bounty of poisoned yellow submarines over his shoulder in one of the ever-present blue plastic bags seen blowing along the roads and washing down the streambeds.

None of the real banana workers had ever met that nameless white guy. They didn’t know or care if a tree had fungus to begin with; it either produced bananas within three years or it didn’t. If it didn’t, you cut it down. If it did, you cut it down and took the bananas. It would never make another bunch; only one to a tree. As for fungus, they only cared that it didn’t show when they presented it to the market and the hucksters and the ships. So, wearing ragged particles of shorts and shirts irretrievably stained by the sticky brown sap of banana stems, they stained them more with the reeking bluish blotches of the liquid fungicide, into which they dipped the bananas with their bare hands for shipment to Europe and the USA.

When they were done dipping them, these dark, serious men and women laid them gently to dry on brown paper draped over what looked to be vinyl-covered exercise machine benches bought from some skanky, defunct New Jersey gymnasium, complete with sweat stains. They then packed them into boxes he found familiar from Florida’s citrus trade, infamous for its exploitation of migrant workers. Sunsweet. Dole. Sunkissed. Sunpicked. Then they hung their scabrous outfits on nails driven into the outsides of the banana shacks, for the rain to wash them as clean as they would ever get, until they returned the next Wednesday for another dose of chemical death. The deference with which they treated the bananas, cradled on those cushioned tables, was better than their own beds, better than they treated their children. The padded benches upon which they sacrificed their own health to avoid bruising the breakfast food of rich Americans was in stunning contrast to the island’s stated philosophy of healthy people who owned little and needed less.

He negotiated the traffic circle, correctly this time, from left to right, to what should have been the first right but here was the last left. Driving past the tourist-oriented demonstration “boxing shed” up the hill from Point Lolo, he wanted to Sunpuke. He decided there and then that, upon his return to the States, he would never again eat a commercial banana. He needn’t have worried; he was never going back.

— 10 —

Kirk had warned him, but he was surprised he actually had to turn around about thirteen times to get to Attley. He asked directions from an old farmer driving a few goats who could not tell him where Attley was, but Ras nevertheless handed him a wad of weed as big as his thumb in a shred of plastic wrap. The fellow was elderly, and Ras was sure that in America the doddering old rag would have been in a wheelchair. He gave the fellow a US dollar, and the half of the fellow’s grin that still held startlingly white teeth lit up the car. He patted Ras on the arm and assured him that although his journey would be long and arduous, the rewards at the end would be great. He proceeded to drive the goats up a slope that Ras could hardly have climbed himself, then followed them into the forest at the top and disappeared. The American gave up on four more mountain tracks that ended at lofty banana shacks or in alpine-jungle logging camps. He asked directions from three teenage girls in jeans and jellies with little stringy tops barely hiding adolescent breasts, and one pointed back the way he had come. They all giggled. He knew she was lying; he’d been up and down every single road from the highway in. But he didn’t yell at her. They were black, they looked nothing like his little white daughters. But if they had lived, his girls would have been like this, wouldn’t they? Surely they would have been snotty, giggling teenagers at some point? He shook his head. It had been seventeen years, his children would have been in their twenties by now. He might have been a grandfather.

Suddenly he wanted to jam the gears, spin the wheels, speed off up the hill, which would say, so clearly, he knew they were steering him wrong. He didn’t. He knew he would just look like an idiot, trying to impress nameless adolescent girls on a mountain road in the precise geographic center of Fucking Nowhere. He pulled slowly away, watching in the rearview as they watched him go. The two who had said nothing both slapped at the one who’d tried to send the fat old white man the wrong way, and they all staggered about the leaf-littered roadway with girlish laughter. He grinned, sharing their humor. He ignored the next four turns and followed the main grade to the end, and sure enough, there at the end was Attley.

Attley didn’t look like much, less of a place than Bells even, which was saying something. But there were a few concrete block houses, and their chalky walls of pink and yellow added color above the dwindling pavement. The roofs were good. In Dominica they had to be, or a house would be flooded every day. Plywood hovels sported metal roofs fit for a Palm Beach mansion. On his visit to Scott’s Head, at the south end of the island, he’d looked down from Fort Cachacrou onto the pitiful collection of tumble-down block-and-concrete they’d just passed through to get there, and he’d been amazed. From atop the fort, high out on the point, the town resembled nothing less than some quaint Italian village with lovely, multi-colored roofs everywhere. It was like a postcard – hell there were postcards of it. The ramshackle buildings, the crime and drugs and prostitution and disease were completely hidden from view. And, he thought bitterly, wasn’t that just how this fucked-up world worked. The truth, like two weightless little coffins, was somehow always concealed from the public at large by some bullshit trick, some sleazy sleight-of-hand. Even worse, there was always a good reason to put the sandbags in there, to make it “look like” his dead daughters still existed, even as corpses; always a plausible rationalization why it was better that the pretty roofs hid the poverty and hopelessness, so no one had to think about the awful reality.

There was a bamboo restaurant and bar, Bayo’s River Place, next to the turn into the village of Attley. The road was so steep he had to cut the wheels hard into the white rocks on the side of the road to park, like they taught you in Driver’s Ed. In Florida, he’d never had to worry about it. Hell, Cocoa Beach was so flat, you could leave a car in neutral and the only way it would move was if the tide came in. Out on the street, a few local girls were gathered around a handsome young man right off the cover of a bodice-ripper romance novel who was sitting on a mountain bike that had to have cost at least five hundred dollars US, more than the annual income of five hard-working local men. His clip-on water bottle was filled with the local bush rum, which he offered all around, even to the white guy, who drew sideways looks from everyone but the man on the bike. As Ras took the bottle from him, the young man fell over on the bike, getting tangled in the frame as he tried to rise, and Ras gathered that the young man, who had startlingly green eyes, was falling-down drunk. He took a pull of the fiery liquor, which wasn’t half bad, and helped the kid to his feet. The drunken fellow righted the bicycle and sat on it again, took the bottle back and turned it up, sucking on the plastic nipple. He said he was from the Dominican Republic and was here to visit what his country considered their “little sister,” Dominica. This made no sense at all to Ras. The Dominican Republic was the eastern half of a much larger island called Hispaniola, which was often confused with Dominica. Its inhabitants were for the most part of white Hispanic descent, while those of Dominica were either uniformly African or Carib. The western part of Hispaniola was, of course, occupied by some other African folks called Haitians, which the denizens of the Dominican Republic most assuredly did not consider their cousins. In fact, they hated them with a bitter passion. They armed themselves with American-made automatic rifles to guard their common border and refused to even allow roads to be built through the mountains between the two countries. There was a damned good reason; Haitians cut down all the trees they could reach. Americans didn’t know it, but the means to cook food was a huge problem in all the islands. Most of the governments in the Caribbean, no matter how corrupt, had long since bitten the bullet and begun importing natural gas. The Duvalier government of Haiti, the most corrupt of all, had instead told their people to cut down the forests and make charcoal to cook with. Forty years later, there were practically no trees left on the western side of the island, deadly floods and landslides were common, and the people there were once again in dire straits.

The Dominicans, descendants of the bloody-minded Spanish and themselves a rational and pragmatic nation, were determined the same thing was not going to happen to them. Every few months the Haitians rioted, attempted to break the borders, were killed in the hundreds, then starved for a while until they rioted again. The Dominican Republic kept a low profile, out of the news, watching it happen over the sights of their US-made M16 rifles. Any Haitian caught crossing the border was shot dead on the spot. While Ras stood talking with him, the handsome Dominican youth fell off his bike again. He wasn’t even riding it, just sitting there with his feet down. The islanders had a saying: never underestimate the power of rum.

Back on his feet again, the boy said with a leer that the locals were very friendly, and with his looks and the way the Attley girls were giggling behind their fingers and elbowing each other, Ras figured the lad had probably gotten laid every few hours since his arrival. The bright green eyes glowing from his dark face, as well as the evidence of more money than they saw in a lifetime, couldn’t have hurt his chances either. As he turned to go into the bamboo bar, the young man once again fell over on the bike and was literally covered by the girls, who pushed and shoved to be the one to help him up.

Bayo’s seemed deserted. Ras finally found Bayo himself down on the bottom floor, where he lived, picking boogers from his impressive bulb of a nose and punching at his laptop computer. Ras had been astonished to find how many people here had internet, but he was used to it by now. As Kirk had taught him, he offered a hand and a smile, and as usual was rewarded with a grin and a friendly reception. Bayo was a narrow, coffee-colored man with short nappy hair and a sharp face, on which the blob of nose was completely out of place.

They went up to the bar and Bayo made him a drink, or rather, he provided the cup, the bottle, and Ras’ choice of fruit. Except for the cheap roadside places in town, this was the tradition: If you drank bush rum, for one price you got a six-ounce plastic cup, a bottle in front of you and whatever mixer might be available, or not. You poured as much as you wanted in the cup each time, and each time you paid. Ras asked for grapefruit, and Bayo stepped across to the bamboo window at the back of the bar. The wood shutter for the window was held open from hinges at the top by a rope that ran through a pulley and was tied to the handle of the refrigerator to the right of the window. A grapefruit tree grew from down the slope behind the bar and Bayo snatched a big green fruit right off a branch. He sliced the fat ball into eighths and set the slices on a paper plate beside Ras at the bar. It was sour but good, with the rum. Citrus needed cool weather to ripen and Ras had resigned himself to the fact that he would never get ripe citrus here, because it never got cold, thus the fruit here stayed forever green. He squeezed a finger’s worth of juice into the cup and filled the rest with rum. You paid the same whether you filled the cup or not. Ras wanted to know what was in the refrigerator. No, he admitted, what he really wanted to know was, if Bayo opened the refrigerator, would the window wag up and down? He was sure it would.

“How much?” Ras asked, and Bayo replied, “US or EC?” “EC.” The skinny black man stuck his right index finger thoughtfully up his left nostril and dug for gold. He looked the white man up and down, as if deciding how much he could charge. “Two-fifty.” That was about seventy-five cents American, and probably twice what he charged the locals. Ras didn’t care, just handed over three of the colorful East Caribbean dollars with pictures of the Queen on them. Bayo dropped two East Caribbean quarters too. Ras left the quarters. “Do you have any ice, my friend?” Bayo grinned. Ice was the one, defining, peculiarly American vice.

Ras knew he was taking a chance. In spite of the fact that Dominica had the cleanest water on Earth, he was the one man on that Earth, or so he believed, who got the screaming shits from drinking it. He’d stuck to bottled water until Kirk pointed out that it was bottled at a spring right down the road and clearly had not saved him. Ras’ dad had always called diarrhea “Montezuma’s Revenge.” Ice was made from local water, and if Montezuma was going to get you, freezing it wouldn’t help. Fuck it, he thought. He’d had the shits as bad or worse in the war.

Besides, he had the cure: Mama Geraldine’s Magical Elixir. He’d called it that since his first conflict with Montezuma, the second day he was there. Rita, who really was a sweet person in spite of her screwy politics and Buddhism, had had him drive her a couple miles upso, the island word for “up the hill.” Upso a ways was the most charming little bit of a mountaintop he had ever seen. It stood above an enchanted forest shrouded in mist and mystery. Geraldine’s little hovel was dirt-floored, cramped, and solid as a rock. She looked like a tiny black Fairy Godmother, he thought, looking at her smiling wrinkles as they were introduced. Her husband, Albert, was a nasty little man who, Kirk said, had a habit of poisoning dogs. Her daughter Sofia was retarded and unable to speak. She would make awful “unhh, unhh” noises when Ras or Kirk was around. Ras thought she was horny. She was thirty but had the body of a teenager. Albert kept a rank fire going out front under an awning, with a joint of meat of some kind always smoking.

“Do you have a son named Kelvin?” Ras had asked Geraldine, who crowed over the white man from America who knew her rich son. He lived in the capital of America, Austin, Texas! And, he was going to bring her a refrigerator! Ras was pleased beyond all reason at the coincidence. He was, he thought, definitely going soft. Rita explained Ras’ problem, and Geraldine led them out the back to her garden. Albert had built raised boxes for all her herbs, set on top of concrete blocks and piled tires. It was amazing, there had to be five or six thousand square feet of growing space, and every inch was bursting with life. Every sort of flower, bulb, grass, and root flourished in the dirt the ramshackle boxes held so precariously at waist height, so Geraldine wouldn’t have to bend over to pick them. She walked up and down the rows, selecting a leaf here, a root there, a small bunch of grass, put them all in a tattered brown bag and gave them to Ras. She told him to grind and mix it well and make a tea from a few pinches every morning and night. Not too much, she said; it was powerful medicine. If he ever wanted to move his bowels again, she said, he’d better not overdo it. And she slapped his arm and cackled at him. Her gleaming white teeth were nearly perfect, and for one second when she smiled, she was almost pretty.

Mama Geraldine’s Magic Elixir had stopped Montezuma in his tracks, and Ras had praised her to the locals, but he noticed some of them turned away when he spoke. Something going on there. Geraldine – Mama Geraldine – he corrected himself, wouldn’t take his money, but Rita said she loved floaters. These were salted, smoked fish from the market in Roseau. Crusted with yellow, greasy salt, they were undoubtedly the most rancid, disgusting fish Ras had ever encountered. But he bought them, and brought them upso to Geraldine’s little house, and refused to give them to Albert who, he was sure, would eat them himself. Albert sported dingy white jockey shorts and a massive boner. When Geraldine finally came out, she was overjoyed to get the floaters and gave him a hard-armed hug. Ras had the sure impression he’d interrupted them getting it on.

— 11 —

As he sipped his grapefruit and rum in Bayo’s River Place, Ras explained to the lethargic local where he was staying, and the man actually perked up. “Yes yes, the white people in the bamboo house.” That was how Kirk and Rita were known all over the island. They weren’t the only white people in Dominica – there were a few hundred scattered here and there – but they were the only white people like them, and he doubted if there were many black people like them either. Kirk was simply the most honest, caring human being Ras had ever known, and he had known him since they were punk kids on bicycles. Somehow Kirk, after a life of grinning debauchery, had found a woman as special as himself, and married her. Despite their shared madness, Ras loved them dearly. He looked hard at Bayo, whose eyebrows went a little north.

“By any chance, my friend, did you ever hear of a white man who used to live around here? A man named Charlie?” It was the second time the American had said “my friend,” and Bayo didn’t like the sound he made when he said that. No, he didn’t like it at all. Bayo’s eyebrows threatened to slide right up the globe and collide with the Arctic Circle of his balding pate. Ras noticed he had begun to sweat. He was picking his nose again and shaking his head, and Ras thought, “He’s lying.” It was from interrogating the Cong tunnel rats in the war. These weren’t the guys topside taking U.S. fire, they were the important ones. They knew a lot if you could get it out of them. He could smell a lie on a fucker’s tongue before he said it. Dealing with every lowlife one met while doing private investigations had kept his skills sharp. He felt just a little sad right then; even Kirk had shown every sign of lying when Ras had asked about Charlie.

“No, no, my friend, no one ever live ’round here like dat.”

The white man didn’t look away from Bayo’s eyes, didn’t move, but something changed about him. Bayo saw it, and he didn’t like that one bit either. It scared him, and he took a step back from the bar. “It was a long time ago,” the suddenly frightening American said. He sounded reasonable. “Maybe you’re just too young to remember.”

Ras was exultant. He had his mojo back, he could feel it, the way his pulse raced, how the eyes of the hapless local he’d cornered like a rat were near the point of terror now. Like in the war, when he was golden; when the angry, frightened little yellow men understood he was different: he meant business. He flexed his shoulders like he’d been taught, both to increase his breathing and loosen his muscles, as well as to intimidate his victims. Bayo decided he wanted very much for the crazy white man to be right. Bayo was simply too young. That was it! He just did not remember. “Maybe,” Ras said calmly, his eyes cold as the ice in his cup, “you could tell me about someone else in Attley who is old enough. Someone who might remember.” It was such a wonderful idea. Bayo knew just the one to talk to! He might be rid of this white devil who did not move but made Bayo think of snakes. Bayo hated snakes. The American’s friend, the white man in the bamboo house, was not at all like this one. This man was dangerous. His eyes were hidden but wide, drinking Bayo in. His nostrils were flared. He seemed to be sniffing for any scent of falsehood. Bayo was afraid to breathe. If he said no, would the serpent strike? Bayo thought of his children, his wife, whom he did not appreciate nearly enough. He spoke.

“Dere is an old woman, upso,” and Ras relaxed enough for Bayo to grasp a breath. “She would know if any such white man ever live here.” After a long pause, Ras tipped up his cup and sucked down the last half at a gulp. He grinned at Bayo and set the cup on the counter. He didn’t seem to be a serpent now. He was just another aging American with half a spare tire and too many credit cards. “So okay then! Let’s go see her.” Bayo let out a long, deep sigh. He would see his wife again, and he would kiss her, he concluded. He would tell her that she was a good wife, and that he was lucky to have her.

— 12 —

Bayo led Ras to a shack so far up the mountain there were no roads, and cars could not go. Ras was glad he’d spent some time his first days here to tramp the hills for exercise. Still, he was a bit winded when they arrived. They couldn’t have been more than fifteen hundred feet above sea level, but he felt his lungs laboring. He lived in Florida, at about fifteen feet above sea level. He’d survived the highlands of Vietnam, but he’d been eighteen, nineteen, and hard as stone. He knew very well the seats on that Boeing turbo-prop he’d flown on from San Juan had been designed for the military in the 1940s, with hard-assed recruits in mind, who averaged five feet-nine inches. He’d flown to Hell on them a couple times. At fifty-two, he was still as tough as any man in the States, and tougher than most. The thing was, the folks in this island walked up and down these hills all the time. He’d known guys from the mountains, and they were iron-sided troopers, just naturally harder than any flatlander.

He had seen a woman he’d been told was in her eighties walk down the mountain every single day, past Kirk’s place, to where she cut bananas all day. Then she walked back up that mountain with a bunch of bananas Ras knew had to weigh fifty pounds, balanced on her head. She held it steady with one hand and plucked a banana now and then with the other, peeling it with her teeth and stuffing it into her mouth. In Florida, she would have been in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle.

The house sat high on a sunlit slope, surrounded by the old, towering coconut palms. Most folks these days grew dwarf Malay Gold coconuts for production; it just made sense. Instead of being thirty feet from the ground like these, they were within reach of a tall man. They were met at the door by a woman who was a scarecrow made of licorice sticks. Her colorful island dress hung like it might on a collection of wire coat hangers, while her hair pointed straight up, grey and white, impossibly thin to rise so high. Inside, the neat little shack was painted white and blue, with bold palm trees and flowers, just like you could see out the door and windows. It was a bright, clean, and friendly place – Ras could feel that as he set his first foot inside. To the left was a counter and sink, with a tiny round table and a single, battered wooden chair. To his right, on the end wall, three brown crosses were painted on a green hill. A testament to the righteous ways of this house.

If Bayo had worn a hat, he would have taken it off and twisted it in his hands. He all but bowed to the old woman, and his eyes never left the ground. “Mama Marfa, dis man be Mr. Ras from America. He friends wit’ de white people in de bamboo house, down to Bells. Mr. Ras, dis Miss Marfa. I am hoping she may recall some’ting of what you wish to hear.” Marfa looked Ras up and down as if he were a questionable piece of fish in the waterfront market. He thought of Geraldine’s floaters and smiled to himself. Marfa saw this grin and didn’t like it much at all, he could tell.

Marfa had a daughter named Georgia. Georgia was so twisted and fractured, she made Sofia look normal. Georgia lay on a dirty blanket on the floor, in front of the three crosses. She was a pathetic creature, yet she seemed to be enjoying life. She smiled at him with a face that might have been pretty were it not so tortured. A string of spittle dripped from the corner of her mouth, into a puddle he could see was always there. He wondered if he could trade his life for hers. He really considered it. If it took, what, brain damage to be happy, who was he to complain? He’d had a great life and he’d fucked it up. Hers was a living Hell in Paradise, yet somehow, in some way he could not quite grasp, she seemed at peace. Bayo was speaking to Marfa in Kwéyòl, and the tiny smile she had displayed as Ras looked kindly towards Georgia disappeared, as though she had just become a frightened little animal. She and Bayo both stared at him now as if he were a six-foot viper. Only Georgia continued to smile.

Marfa looked at Bayo as if she might cut his balls off for bringing this white devil-man here. Ras turned all his charm on the old island gal, smiling and speaking slowly in his best Southern drawl. “I’m just here tryin’ to find out what happened to my Uncle Charlie, so’s my mamma can go to her grave knowing how he passed. I sure am sorry to bother you folks so.” He didn’t think it was going to work and was pretty sure it didn’t. But he could see the old woman hesitate. Bayo frowned. This wasn’t the reptile whose fangs he had seen at the bar. Without looking away from Ras, he spoke in Kwéyòl to Marfa in a low voice. “Don’t trust him Mama, he have murder in his eyes.” It was as if Ras knew the language; Bayo might have been speaking plain English. Georgia laughed, a bright little tinkle that sounded like she was the smartest person in the room and having a fine time of it. Marfa’s own eyes narrowed at him once again, hardening into little black stones. He resolved to have a serious discussion with Bayo when they left. Offer him Erasmus Taft’s Patented Motivational Seminar on the values of trauma-induced paralysis, guaranteed to change the little fucker’s snot-picking life forever. He was about to suggest they go shop for Bayo’s new wheelchair when Georgia began screeching.

“Nahh! Nahhh! Eee goo mah! Eee goo mah!” Marfa sat down in her one chair – Ras realized Georgia would never sit in a chair – and her eyes were now wide and white, rolling in fear and confusion, first at this enormous American, and then back at Bayo. The barman seemed confused. He could make nothing of the disabled girl’s raving. As if he’d asked out loud, Marfa spoke. “Georgia says no, he’s a good man.” She went to the girl, crooning softly in a Kwéyòl voice she had obviously cultivated over many long years of taking care of this tortured bit of humanity. Knowing perfectly well he was most certainly not a good man, Ras still felt a tiny particle of his glacial heart break off, calving frigid fragments of a compassion he didn’t know he still owned into the icy, inhospitable waters of the world. He had not realized until now that his determination not to fail in this one thing had brought out some of the worst and the best in him, things he thought he had buried some rough years back, along with two tiny coffins.

Georgia was having none of her mother’s calming talk, thrashing swollen joints against the wooden floor, shouting masticated words from her twisted mouth. Marfa swiveled her shrunken shanks onto the floor, trying to prevent Georgia’s head from banging the boards while never taking her terrified gaze from Erasmus Taft. Then Georgia whipped around, her head now in Marfa’s lap. She stared at him too, but not quite; it was as if she saw into another place, far away.

“Anhh dahh whee ey ha nee ah, boh bullah anh ranh, anh lanh,” she intoned, and Marfa, startled, translated. “And…and dat which dey have need of, bot’ bullocks, and rams, and lambs.” The hairs on Ras’ arms stood on end. It was part of Darius’ Decree, from the book of Ezra. Chapter six, verse nine. He had been raised in the Episcopal church, but his father had been born bog-Irish Catholic. He knew the Bible as well as anybody. The Jesuits had even offered him a scholarship in college. Their thing was debate and discussion, and he’d excelled in debate club, but he’d had no urge to convert, nor to engage with the brothers, who were mostly gay. Georgia continued, while Marfa, eyes wide, spoke the words he knew so well.

“…for de burnt offerings of de God in Heaven, wheat, salt, wine an’ oil, according to de appointment of de priests which are at Jerusalem, let it be give dem day by day wit’out fail.” Almost before thinking, Ras took up the tenth verse right on cue. “That they may offer sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of Heaven, and pray for the life of the King, and his sons.” Georgia didn’t miss a beat. The eleventh verse, now that he understood what she was saying, came out almost comprehensible even without Marfa repeating the words.

“Also I have made a Decree, that whosoever shall alter this word, let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be hanged thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this.” The dunghill in which he currently found himself was silent for a time, and Ras was instantly positive that Georgia was perfectly intelligent; despite her disability, her clear dark eyes bored into his own with the intensity of a Socialist college student. It was as if she had fired some powerful mental weapon directly into his brain, and as he rocked back Marfa startled him when she spoke again.

“Bayo, you go now. You have de River Place to run, so go run it. I will be fine.” The island man, his finger once again rooting in his capacious nose, made as if to protest, but she cut him off with a glare. “You be de one to bring him here! If he be bad, I know who to blame. Now go!” Ras was holding a hand to his mouth as Bayo stalked reluctantly down the hill, in a huff conjured of equal parts anger, fear and relief. Marfa turned back to him, calm now and very much in control. “So, you know of de story in Ezra, Mr. Ras from America?” He nodded, overcome with a schoolboy’s nostalgia. Marfa might have been one of his Sunday School teachers.

“Of course. The Jews, led by Zerubabel, son of Sheltiel, and Yeshua, son of Jazadak, began to build the house of God, the Temple, at Jerusalem. Tatnai, the Persian governor of ‘this side of the river,’ and Shetharboznai, Persian governor of the ‘other side of the river,’ questioned their right to do so, probably because another temple in their precincts would siphon off donations from their own.” They hadn’t taught him that in Sunday School, but he’d pretty much figured out how things worked with religion on his own over the years. He couldn’t believe he was discussing Old Testament politics with a withered crone and her devastated daughter, on a deserted jungle hillside in a tiny Caribbean island. Marfa, however, in her schoolmarm role, was nodding in confirmation. He was surprised that his lifelong need for approval and validation from his elders still followed him even now. “So, you know de word of God; dat be good. And you understand dat de evil ones try to stop de men of God for selfish reasons; den and now, it always be so. What happen next?” Georgia stared at him, her empty smile and the bit of drool in the corner of her mouth incongruous with the sharp comprehension in her eyes.

“Well, the Jews told the governors that the old King, Cyrus, had directed them to build it, so instead of just killing them and pulling down their new Temple, they went to the new King, Darius, and asked him what to do.” Marfa was rocking now, and Georgia gave a sudden loud snore from between her bowed knees.

“And Darius say to give dem whatever de priests want. Now why he say dat?” Ras frowned. This was beginning to feel like a test. Not that he minded; he had always been good at tests. He could never resist the chance to show off his intellect. He was on top of this.

“So the priests of the Temple would pray for the life of the King and his sons, like it says in verse eleven. With all the necessary burned sacrifices, all the required pomp and circumstance. It means Darius believed in the power of the Hebrew God.”

“And you, my son? Do you believe in de power of God?” He could have been ten years old again, answering father Radebaugh in Bible class about his favorite verses of the Old Testament. “Yes, Mama,” he said softly, his wandering eyes testifying to his truthfulness. Marfa clapped her hands, her face went up to heaven, and she broke out in an ecstasy of Kwéyòl prayer. She spread her arms above her head, swaying, calling out in a language at once foreign and domestic, completely alien to him yet totally comprehensible.

For the first time Ras began to be frightened. He tensed up. His training said fear was the killer. Frightened men made mistakes, and mistakes got you killed. “What is happening here, Mama?” Marfa, who had subsided into murmurs of joy like folks he’d seen at some Pentecostal churches in America, swung her head up to look at him. “Georgia last name,” she stated pointedly, “be Cyrus.” His head seemed to rotate oddly, or maybe it was the room going around him, or the world turning? What the hell was that supposed to mean? “Georgia is t’irty-eight years old. When she was t’irteen, she said she would put de new king on de t’rone, just like Cyrus. Only his name would not be Darius. What is your real name, Mr. Ras from America?” He stared at her, drawing back as if from some unknown threat.

“My…name, is Erasmus Taft…” Marfa shrieked. The old woman was shaking and shouting in religious fervor. “It be him! It be him, girl! You said eet, all dem years ago, and now he finally come!” The girl, who he could not believe was actually thirty-eight, was grinning madly, her head snapping back and forth, and groans of delight were torn from her throat. What kind of bullshit was this? She saw his hesitation and shook her head even more. Marfa said, “You cannot escape eet, Mr. Ras Tafari from America. You will be de new king! De young savior will tell you, on de mountainside, in de rain, in de storm, just like Georgia say so long ago. She say de new king would be named for de saint, Ras Tafari. But we sho’ don’t be t’inking you was gon’ be white!” The young savior? What storm? He could only think of a young man on Kirk’s property who called him Papa Ras Tafari, his “American father,” who was always talking about how the spirits spoke to him when he was stoned. His own head was shaking now, he was automatically tightening up, his body readying itself for action, when the old lady put her tiny, bony hand over her puckered mouth and gave out a mousy little laugh.

“You tryin’ to frighten me, Mr. Ras Tafari from America? ’Cause let me tell you, baby, we already be so frightened we cannot be no more.” Ras was so shaken he actually blushed, something he didn’t think had happened since his junior year in high school, when Bonnie Durling had kissed him in front of everybody in the lunchroom. He had indeed unconsciously been using his skills to try to scare his “subject.” He felt like a child caught doing something nasty. Marfa, clearly taking pity, rescued him.

“Mr. Ras Tafari from America, you come searching for your family, and I see your heart is good.” His brain was screaming that there was danger here, his feet were telling him to run, but he was rooted to the floor. Georgia smiled madly from before the painted crosses on the painted hill. “I will tell you ’bout Charlie,” Marfa continued, “but you must know dis. Your way is dark, and you will never go back de way you have come. All dis has been foretold.” Her words seemed to burrow like worms into the bones of his arms, and they itched and burned, like when he was trying to quit the cocaine and still his hands laid out that next line.

Marfa painfully pushed herself up from the floor, lovingly placing Georgia’s waving head on a fold of the stained blanket. On the counter by the end window, next to the tiny sink, sat a bottle of dark bush rum, a shot glass, a plastic picnic tumbler, and what had to be a shaving mug. She poured the shot glass full and tossed it back, bending over it and nodding with pleasure, then rising with a sigh to shake her head. She seemed to understand her guest’s agitation. She poured the tumbler to the top, brought it to him, then returned for a curtain call with her shot glass. She waved him to the rickety chair, then settled herself beside Georgia on the floor and began to speak. Her words imitated the clipped accent of the Scottish slave drivers who had taught her ancestors this bastardized form of English at the end of a whip.

— 13 —

“Charlie Dayton, he come to Dominica in oh, nineteen sebenty-five or six. Not many white folk in the island den, I can tell you dat. De ones be here long time, everybody knows, but you don’ see dem much. Astaphans be here a long time. Bryzees, dey been here longer. Dey own, you know,” and her withered arm waved the glass in an encompassing gesture. “Everyt’ing.” It was true. Astaphans owned general stores and building supply houses all over the island. Bryzees owned most of the grocery and liquor stores. He thought the Astaphans might be Portuguese, but the only one he’d ever met looked Greek. The Bryzees looked like the same Indians or Pakistanis who dominated the convenience trade in the States. A tiny minority, whose families had been here so long they had bypassed America entirely, yet still controlled much of the commerce in this tiny country.

“Anyway, Charlie come wit’ his cheap little black island girl and his money and his demons, and in no time, de demons, dey eat de girl.” Ras’ eyebrows were pulling his sagging cheeks up, headed for his hairline, and he coughed raw rum fumes into the tumbler, which was half empty now. His head swam as Georgia Cyrus once again let out a long, grinding snore. She seemed to go from waking to sleep and back like a ping-pong ball. “Oh yes,” Marfa went on, slurring her words a bit now, “de demons be wit’ Charlie from right away. Don’ know if it be him or her first, but one or de odder, dey got de sickness alright. Him an’ de girl never be seen in daytime, but always out drinkin’ at night. Dogs begin to go missing, den a goat here an’ dere. Agoutis lay around dead, bellies open, flies all over.” Kirk had told Ras agoutis were like a giant hamster, and they were really good to eat.

“Next people find a cow, guts tore open and t’roat ripped out. Now everybody really angry, ’specially de owner. Not too many cows in de island, and dey wort’ a lot of money you know. Men get drunk and run around at night wit’ de guns and flashlights, actin’ like childrens. A wonder, t’ank God, dey don’t shoot dey own feet. Women cry and hug babies, call to each de odder from de doorways, but not’ing happen. Den we find a girl downso in de forest, she is killed, horrible. Like she fights whatever is killin’ her.” Ras roused from his slightly tipsy fascination to ask, “Her arms had wounds, like she tried to defend herself?” Marfa nodded grimly. “Oh yes, she defend herself all right, true dat. She a big, mean banana girl, she carry a cutlass like any man.” This was the island name for a machete, betraying the nation’s schizophrenic heritage. It had been ruled at different times by the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. During the time England had held sway, machete had been strictly a Spanish word. Marfa motioned with her glass, and he got the bottle and poured her another slash.

She slugged half of it down and pointed at him with her other hand, her head weaving just a bit with the rum. “After dat, t’ings get worse. Animals get found two, t’ree a week. Den a man dead. Den anodder woman. Two little childrens. Oh, de policemans come, dey ask questions, look at de dead people, but dey don’t stay after dark. Dey don’ wan’ be dead too come daytime, what you t’ink?” Ras nodded, his own head a little loose on his shoulders. He poured himself another half tumbler of the caustic bush rum, took a solid slurp, Marfa watching him with a knowing grin. A moonless night in Dominica was blacker than the asshole of Hell, and streetlights were nonexistent. No one went out at night in the country, and Attley, at the back end of nowhere, was no different. Ras didn’t blame “de policemans” one fucking bit. You could take a single wrong step, drunk or not, and wind up with a broken neck right there in the concrete ditch, forget some psycho murderer. But there was something he was missing here, and it wasn’t just because of the rum. What had she said? Something about a sickness. He focused his wandering eyes and started to ask about it when Marfa continued her tale.

“Finally, de girl, she up and die. Nobody know just when, ’cause by de time dey find her, she be all rotten. Like he one dem crazy people, keep her a long time, you know? But dey don’ know what,” and she leaned close, “she be dead all de time. She one like dat, you know? ’Cause let me tell you, baby, all de animals, all de people, only t’ing de same about dem is almost no blood. Dey all be dead, torn apart even, and every one, most’ dey blood be gone.” Ras felt like his eyebrows must surely have struck his slightly receding hairline by now, and he remembered how Bayo had raised his own so high before he had made his escape. What the fuck did that mean?

“‘Like dat’?” he asked and took another gulp of the bush rum. It was starting to taste pretty good. “That’s the sickness you talked about? Something about the blood? It, what, it dried up their blood?” Marfa was shaking her head hard, almost laughing. Her face seemed to swing way too far to either side. “You don’ be listening, Mr. Ras Tafari from America! De dead don’ got de sickness, de ones who kill dem do! Dey be zombies!” That stopped him. He drew his head back, sure his eyebrows were lost forever. This was getting out of control. First all the crazy Bible shit, now they were into horror-flick territory. He decided it was time to wrap this up. He’d thought he was getting somewhere, but now it looked like Marfa was batshit, and getting drunker than a sailor on shore leave. He polished off his own rum and set it down on the little table. He tried to gather his thoughts.

“So, mama, please, tell me, whatever happened to Charlie Dayton?” She creaked to her feet and shuffled to the table, pouring off another shot and tossing it back. The rum in the bottle was getting low. After a big sigh redolent of fumes, she turned to him. “Charlie take to stayin’ at a house over in de Carib Reserve, right on de coast. Here in Attley, de killin’s stop. In de Reserve, killin’s begin. When David’s Hurricane come, dat house be blown away. Not’ing lef’ but de foundation.” She looked hard at him, because there were tears in his eyes now. He remembered partying in the Eau Gallie U-Haul with Kirk and all his friends while David blew at a hundred miles an hour outside, and they smoked dope and snorted coke and Tabitha was there, she was alive, she was alive.

He turned red eyes on Marfa and asked the question. “And did the killings stop in the Reserve?” Marfa just nodded, her eyes distant. She had her own memories of “David’s Hurricane,” and it wasn’t a paltry hundred-mile wind in this island, but a disaster the nation had yet to completely recover from, with hundreds of deaths and the destruction of half the buildings on the island. Many were still nothing but remnants, never rebuilt, and many were the bodies of loved ones who had never been found. The smell of feces filled the tiny house despite the breeze, and the sound of Georgia’s snoring stuttered and stopped. Marfa looked up from the floor, her face a misery now.

“Please let us be alone now, Mr. Ras Tafari from America,” she said softly, and he left her to clean up the twisted prophet who was her daughter, as she had these thirty-eight years gone. He stumbled down the hill towards Bayo’s River Place, and he saw the drunken cyclist from the Dominican Republic, fallen once again, snoring as loud as Georgia now, his fancy bike stolen. His yellow polyester team shirt, with the thousands of tiny little holes to wick sweat, was bunched around his head, as if the locals had failed to quite pull it off him. His red Spandex shorts were gone, and one of the Attley girls had tied a little green ribbon around his flaccid if impressive black cock. He still grasped the water bottle of bush rum, and Ras plucked it from his silly-assed little fingerless gloves, which the American had never been able to figure out. The bottle sloshed with a bit of the rum still left, and he tipped it up. It was better than the rotgut he’d been swilling at Marfa’s shack, but not nearly as good as the St. John’s Island brand he’d been buying in town. At that point, Ras really didn’t give a shit.

The bush rum was just white lightning, like he’d had all his life, growing up in Florida in the fifties and sixties. People mistook it for “moonshine,” which was in fact made from corn, as any country boy knew. “White lightnin’” was made from sugar cane, as was all rum. Since the time the first Europeans set foot in the New World, the Demon Rum had been their comfort and often their downfall. The searing liquid was gone, and his head rang a little as he tossed the water bottle on the ground.

Speeding back down the mountain at thirty miles an hour, Ras shook his head over the meaning of all he’d been told. If he was the new king, who was the old one? And what the hell was he king of? What would the “young savior” tell him on the mountainside, in the storm. It sounded like a folk song from the sixties. Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and what the fuck? He racked his brain to remember who was king of Persia after that particular Darius, as if there was a clue there that would explain some of this madness. He sparked up a long piece of the joint that had been stinking up his shirt pocket with ashes. Yeah, that would help.

What bothered him the most was the implication that God meant for all this to happen, as if the Temple was once again being built, and once again the King needed to preserve it. Herod the Great had rebuilt the Temple, only to have the Romans tear it down again. The twelfth verse of Ezra, chapter six, ran through his mind. “And may the God that hath caused His name to dwell there, destroy all Kings and people, that shall put their hand to alter and destroy this house of God which is at Jerusalem.”

— 14 —

Of course, now, as he fishtailed down the streaming mountain in the hurricane that Georgia, or actually her mother, had predicted, Ras finally did the math of Marfa’s statement in his head, and damn near wound up in the flooded concrete ditch. He squelched to a sliding halt under the spread of a calabash tree just one curve from Vena’s Place. The young savior. Salbado. Would tell him, about “it.” On the hillside. In a storm. This storm, which had not even been over the horizon when he had gone upso to Attley and Bayo’s River Place and Marfa’s pitiful shack under the tall coconut trees. What else had Salbado said?

Vena’s Place

“I don’t see you leavin’ here any time soon, papa Ras.” Those words ripped through his brain like an AK-47 cutting loose in the jungle. He had not only missed his plane because he was drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat, but now there was a storm, and he would most certainly not be leaving here any time soon; it would be two or three days at least. And he would be a king. No, like a king. And Marfa had said his way was dark, he would not be going back the same way? He began to wonder if he would ever get back at all. With shaking hands he rolled two more joints from Salbado’s magic stash, then lit one. He toked on it gratefully, exhaled. The incredible rain flooded across the windshield. He took a long pull from the rum bottle. It was getting lower; he was getting higher. The warm glow of the dope and alcohol finally gave him the courage to put the car in gear and get it back on the road. He pulled out from the little cliff that was held up by the roots of the massive calabash tree and started down the incline to the curve before Vena’s. He held the joint in his mouth at a jaunty angle like the pictures he’d seen of FDR with his cigarette holder and took the turn in second gear. It was an easy turn, even in a hurricane.

The hillside below Vena’s Place had been bulldozed by an island man who had clear-cut the trees and planted dasheen. Kirk had bitched about it several times, in spite of the fact that he had cut most of the native trees on his own land and planted coconuts, flowers, bananas, and houses. It was just one of the quirks about his odd friend, who was like a screaming left-wing environmentalist one day and a calculating conservative the next. The rain cascading down the mountainside had filled the concrete ditch to overflowing, and now a massive bulge in the red clay soil and rocks had formed just below the edge of the road. Ras was never sure if the weight of his little four-wheel had actually set off the landslide, or if he was just lucky enough to be there at the perfect moment to be caught up in it. As he made the curve at a reckless twenty-five miles per hour, the pavement in front of Vena’s began to break up into jagged chunks. These tumbled into the concrete ditch, then the entire slope, road and all, gave way.

Now was when the Suzuki proved it was worth every bit of the extra five bucks a day. As the roadway in front of his hood fell away to the right, he slammed the shift into third and turned the wheel to follow it. There was nowhere else to go. Where the road had been, there was now a giant hole. He’d been in four-wheel drive the whole time and now that paid off too. The ditch was filled with road debris, and his wheels left the ground as his vehicle bounded across it. He flew, and as he flew, he imagined the wheels wobbling in slow motion like they did in the commercials, when the text under the video said something like: “Closed course. Professional driver. Do not attempt this suicidal maneuver at home or anywhere else, as if you had shit like this happening every day in your pathetic suburban back yard.” The Gran Vitarra tilted forward with nightmare slowness, then smashed into the muddy dasheen field like an overloaded garbage scow nosing under a rogue wave. Time sped up to freakish velocity as mud and leaves spattered across his vision. He was now careering down the mountain, with the mountain, out of control. A cataract of rocks and uprooted trees tumbled along with him, dragging entire enchanted forests of vines and giant ferns along with them. Pieces of the pavement showed their grey clay bottoms and broke up even further as they bounced with him down the hillside. The booming rumble of the landslide drowned out the roar of the hurricane winds.

His brave little SUV was now jack-rabbiting among the flying tangle of rock and soil and rain, landing now on the front wheels, now the rear, never staying on the ground for more than the blink of his astonished eyes. The text under the commercial now read: “We TOLD you not to try this shit at home, you stupid asshole! Now you are well and truly FUCKED, and don’t even THINK about a lawsuit because we have lawyers, guns, and money, and we will BURY you!” He bounced around inside the cab like a bug trapped in a shaken jar, in spite of the safety harness, and thanked a God he wasn’t sure he believed in anymore he had it on. It was like a pissed-off big brother had ahold of his shirt, and was showing him every rock-hard, steel-pointed corner of that car, up close and personal. The rum bottle went airborne and smashed through the back window, and Ras observed, with heartfelt regret, the remaining reefers from his top pocket spinning through space like something from a sci-fi flick. He saw the ground coming from a long way up. His face hit the steering wheel with a star-studded crunch and he was launched into oblivion.

— 15 —

The bats always came slapping and bumping into the rafters of the tiny concrete house just before the rain. The tin roof, roaring like a cattle train in the daily deluge, was supported solely by three-inch wooden slats two feet apart, and the bats wriggled their way under the corrugations and along the rafters and into their accustomed spaces. Kirk had explained that the bats couldn’t navigate in the rain. When the skies opened, which they did two or three times every day and night, the bats took refuge in their haunts until it stopped. Rita had hung a nicely printed sheet over the bed, done up with rainbows and unicorns, to prevent bat turds from falling on unsuspecting guests as they slept.

His first full day in Dominica they had gone to the Emerald Pool, a magical combination of a waterfall, a pool, and a cave. The drive to get there amazed him. Dominica was a world of flowing jungle so green and verdant he was mesmerized for hours at a time. Paying to get into the park was an ordeal he would soon learn was standard operating procedure in the Caribbean. Visitors went to the first table, where Kirk and Rita showed their papers of residency and Ras showed his passport, and then their Dominican driver licenses, and they were asked why they were there. There was nothing else to do in the park but to hike to the Pool, yet they had to state that, in fact, they wished to visit that very Pool. Yes, Kirk and Rita explained, they had been to the Pool before. No, Ras told them, he had not, but he was looking forward to the experience. If the hefty black lady in the Parks Service uniform detected his sarcasm, she hid it well. She told them it was ten dollars EC each, and when Kirk handed her two twenty-dollar bills with the Queen’s ever-young face looking out from them, she frowned and asked if they did not have the correct amount. Kirk admitted they did not. After some time considering, she turned to the hefty black man at the next table, also in the Parks Service uniform, and asked him if he had change. He said he did not, in Kwéyòl so thick Ras couldn’t understand a word. Neither of the Parks attendants seemed to have any idea what to do. Kirk asked for one of the twenties back and walked the ten feet to the lady at the snackette counter and asked if she had two tens for a twenty. She smiled and said she did. He got the two tens, came back to the attendants, and gave the man one of the tens. The man looked confused, until Kirk took the ten back and gave it to the lady, who then smiled and gave each of them a pass to attend the park. Ras thought they would go on then, but Kirk put a hand on his arm and shook his head. Holding the three passes, he sat down in front of the man, who had been there to observe the entire transaction, and presented him with the passes.

The man examined each pass carefully, then asked if the people who had bought these passes in front of his very eyes were present. Kirk assured him they were. The man asked to see their passports and Dominica driver licenses, upon which Kirk and Rita again presented their papers of residency and driver licenses, and Ras, barely able to hide an incredulous grin, again handed over his passport and driver license. The man examined each of these documents minutely, scrutinized the white people before him as if they were suspects in some horrible crime, and finally, reluctantly, produced a stamper and ink pad from a box on the table in front of him and, very carefully and deliberately, inked his stamper and stamped each pass in purple ink with the sigil of the Parks Service of the Government of Dominica. He then handed the passes back to Kirk, who gave one each to Rita and Ras and told Ras in a clear and serious voice not to lose it, or he might be fined for not having it. He could, Ras saw, barely keep from screaming with laughter, but for the first time, the large black man at the second table seemed to approve of their presence.

Kirk suggested that, given the time it had taken to get their passes, they might do well to buy something for lunch from the snackette counter, as it often ran out of food if – for instance, if tourists from a cruise ship arrived and bought out its day’s supply of fried chicken and bakes. Bakes were little meat pies to which Ras was partial, common at Jamaican restaurants in Fort Pierce, so Ras bought two chicken legs and two bakes. The lady at the counter, the same lady who had watched their entire exchange with the Parks attendants and given Kirk the change, asked if they had come to see the Emerald Pool. Ras had just bitten into one of the bakes when the lady inquired, and it was all he could do not to spit the mouthful of beef and pastry ten feet across the shaded patio. Kirk held his arm and pounded his back while he coughed, explaining to the lady that the mild spices of the bake must have somehow disagreed with his friend. She responded with great concern, expressing her heartfelt hopes that Jah, the Rastafarian avatar of Jesus Christ, would be with his friend and keep him safe.

They hiked to the Emerald Pool through towering forests of D’Leau Gommier, water-gum trees. Massive buttresses of their roots protruded in woody ridges to the ground, helping to support their immense bulk and height. Kirk had them pose for pictures inside the mossy caverns formed by the enormous trunks. Beneath the canopy were armies of la Fouche, giant ferns like fairy palm trees. There were massive stands of cycads, which also looked like palm trees but were a much older species, one of the oldest plant families on Earth. The tallest of the giant ferns stood perhaps twenty feet high, their waxy fronds describing perfect, drooping circles in the mild green leaf-light. The corduroy pathway under their feet was made of wood from the Fouche, harvested in the dark of the moon, according to Kirk. Cut at any other time, the spongy stem of the giant fern would rot within a year. However, taken in the two or three correct days of the month, the hardy sections forming the walkway would resist rot and termites for twenty years or more.

The second day, they drove to Wotten Waven – “Rhymes with rotten raven,” Rita sang out, obviously a joke between them. Ras met Tia, owner of Tia’s Bamboo Cottages. He had learned right off to do the knuckle-bump instead of offering his hand to shake, as the islanders feared infection from hand contact, and, Ras thought, they were right. Ras brought his fist back, thumped his chest, and in a low voice said, “Respect.” Tia opened his mouth in a grin so broad Ras thought the islander’s small rows of perfect white teeth might attempt an escape. Tia thumped his own chest in return and repeated the traditional greeting: “Respect.”

Tia was the architect of the bamboo house lived in by none other than the famous “white people in the bamboo house”: Kirk and Rita. Tia’s Bamboo Cottages were scattered down the steep slope to the River Blanc, which rattled comfortably over various rocks and any number of minor waterfalls along his property. On an island already considered a jungle paradise, it was heaven on earth. They ordered drinks at the Bamboo Bar, then explored the Bamboo Hut steam room and hot tub, another outdoor hot pool, several Bamboo cottages and a tiny concrete bathroom. The door to the bathroom consisted of a thick layer of passion vine in full and glorious purple bloom.

They sat in a thatched cabana under a giant nutmeg tree drinking Tia’s famous rum and passion fruit cocktail. At least, the sign out front said it was famous. A grey-striped kitten ate coconut from a broken shell on the ground. Grey-striped chickens pecked at other coconut shells but kept wary eyes on the cat. Fat, grey, striped lizards three feet long gulped rotting coconut meat from the same scatter of shells, staring hungrily at the kitten, and keeping wary eyes on the chickens.

In just the short time he’d been on the island, Ras was already considering staying here, buying land and building a house. Anyone in his right mind would have done the same, he thought; it truly was paradise. He asked Tia about his houses, and how his were guaranteed to stand for twenty years or more, while others rotted away or were consumed by termites and other wood-destroying insects.

“Bamboo, my friend, and every odder plant and tree, dey have a time for de cutting. Not all de same, some on de dark of de moon, some on de waxin’ and some on de wanin’. Some wood you only cut on one or two days of de year. But whatever de time is, you cut it at dat time, it last as long as you need it, true dat.” They all took more rum drinks down the slippery stone pathway to the outdoor hot pool, and Tia went out of sight around the hillside to turn on the pipes. The hot water was fed by the sulphur springs nearby, the outflow of which caused the river to be white, thus the French name, Blanc. The steaming mineral water flowed through black PVC pipe and quickly filled the stone tub, which was more like a pool, about ten feet by six. Towering nutmeg and water-gum trees presided over them while the river sang from down the slope. Tia joined them and they all lay in the healing waters with their legs out to the middle of the pool and sipped on the devastating cocktails. Tia continued his explanation of the rules of natural forestry.

“You see de piles of trees on de way here, don’t you?” Ras admitted he had. “We cut dem two years ago on de first day of de new moon, and we will leave dem lay for another t’ree years more. When de proper time come, dey will be made into boards for a house and dey will last one hundred years. Maybe more; we don’t know.” Ras sucked at his drink, lay his head back and dreamed. He saw a pair of rare Cicerou parrots, the national bird of Dominica, making kissy up the slope. They lived on the ground and were being driven to extinction by the introduction of housecats. Seeing them was supposed to mean good luck.

Cicerou parrot

— 16 —

At night the rain would invade, driving the bats before it, and Ras slept in the tiny concrete house as he hadn’t slept in a decade. Only in Vietnam did it rain like here. He wished he had his old helicopter tapes. It really pissed him off, him and about a million other vets, how the Hollywood clowns made movies where the sound of a helicopter sets a veteran off like some psycho violence bomb. Hey, you morons, he would think, the Cong didn’t have helicopters. The sound of choppers meant you were safe, that maybe you could sleep tight for a few lousy hours. Those were your helicopters. Like thousands of other survivors, Ras had purchased audio recordings of helicopter sounds, particularly the Hueys used so extensively during the campaign in Southeast Asia.

The first man to sell those tapes was a reformed Jewish lad from Utica, New York, named Ammon ben Gurion Meir. He was a very distant relative, as he would frostily remind anyone so crass as to mention it, of Golda Meir, once Prime Minister of Israel and, in Ammon’s opinion, a horrible warmonger. His friend Moshe, who had served two brutal tours in Vietnam and come home minus half a leg and most of his sanity, had told him he could not sleep without the soothing sounds of helicopters. Ammon had found some recordings and the concept had just taken off. By 1987, he was moderately well-to-do by the standards of the Jewish community in Utica; by Erasmus Taft’s standards the bastard was stinking rich, although Ras was unaware of that. He was just one of countless veterans who had bought the tapes, which sold under the name of Patriotic Recordings, Inc. Ammon had branched out into recordings of automatic weapons fire, artillery barrages, and more, and although they had never sold as well as the helicopter tapes, he had still made a pretty penny from them.

These sales had accorded Ammon the success he enjoyed, and this financial accomplishment had allowed him to send his mother, Sara Gideon Meir, on her dream vacation to Florida. He had long since forgiven Mother, God rest her soul, and his father too, might he burn in his Christian hell for eternity, for beating them both throughout Ammon’s childhood, for naming him after Israel’s second-worst warmonger, David ben Gurion. He wanted her to have some fun before she passed away. She did. She had the time of her life at the Florida theme parks and had visited her long-lost sister Rebekah in Port Saint Lucie for two whole weeks. On the way home, she was crushed and burned to death along with her worthless, expensive, and irritating little dog. A huge truck carrying wrecked cars had slammed into the back of her Hillel Tours bus, and Ammon would never see her again. There had been some unpleasantness about the driver of the bus and the dog, a lawsuit, but his cousin Abraham, the lawyer from Syracuse, had seen to it, for a fee, that the family of the driver never saw a dime.

— 17 —

Ras woke up, half out of his seat belt and thrown sideways in the car, which was sitting at a crazy angle. He remembered now, with the winds shrieking and the rain funneling through the hole the rum bottle had made in the back window. Xerxes had been King of Kings after Darius the First. The guy who gotten stalled for a few days at an old hot bath spa called Thermopylae by a few thousand Greeks. Thrmopylae was in a narrow pass and the Greeks held there against Xerxes’ army of two hundred thousand mercenaries and slaves. Everybody said it was only three hundred Spartans, but they always forgot the four thousand other Greeks who stood and died with them, and forgot the storm that had destroyed Xerxes’ fleet and was the real source of his defeat. Without that storm, Xerxes would have gone on from the minor delay of exterminating those few bothersome sheep-herders to invade the Greek mainland and conquer it utterly.

Someone, and he suspected the same pissed-off brother who had dragged him around the car by his shirt on the way down, had also hit a home run off his nose with a pinewood slugger and the blood and agony were still flowing. He coughed about half his front teeth onto his aching right arm and felt a sharp grinding in his mouth. It was as if the credits of a movie titled “Forget Not Having Dentures” scrolled before his eyes.

Someone was knocking – no, more like pawing – at the window. He turned to look, and his head spun sickeningly. The flying water hid the black features of the person from his view, but somehow he managed to hit the button for the electric window, hoping for some help. The glass whined painfully down, and Ras faced a nightmare. Stark whites of bloodshot eyes glared from a flat, black face ruined by some hideous disease. Ras clawed at the buttons on the door, trying to shut out this horror from the flying storm. The face swam closer, clawed hands reaching, the black skin deeply pitted and wrinkled, as if it were breaking up like the road in front of Vena’s. The window was six inches from closing when its edge smashed into the face and the hands. The shattered lips left some putrid slime instead of blood. The hands grabbed for him, impossibly strong. Pain ripped through Ras’ shoulder. He swept the intruding arms against the back of the window frame, battering at them with his own forearms again and again until he felt the bones of the intruding arms break. His training had taught him that most men would quit with that kind of injury, but that scabrous face still slavered at the partially open window with teeth far too long to be human. Ras whimpered like a frightened child as he tried desperately to close the gap.

He struck backhanded at the horrible face and it jerked back from the window. He heard a slurping, popping sound and the glass finally rolled up. Ras let out a loud sigh of relief as he caught a flicker of himself in the rearview: nose bloody and swollen, eyes deep pools of bruise. He’d never been so scared. Not even when angry Oriental men with serious attitude problems had actually shot him in the leg had he been so scared. Not even the second time, when they had shot him in the back. With a thump the flat, black face was back, trying to bite at him through the windshield. The arms slammed into the glass, but the left arm now ended at the elbow with a shard of bone sticking out, and it hammered again and again but left no blood, only dark, oozing slime. Ras thought crazily, maybe he should write to thank the folks who had invented auto safety glass, but that would have to wait.

Ras heard a greasy bubbling from beside him and looked down to see the forearm, twitching between the seat and the right-side door. And all the times he’d dropped a joint down there, he thought wildly, now wouldn’t that have been useful! Remembering his training, he told himself: Screaming won’t save you. Screaming won’t save you. But it would gear you up. He was hyperventilating, screaming out in deep primate roars, which clearly meant he was ready to fight or die. It was a good thing, too, because at least ten more white-eyed figures were now closing on the little Suzuki. God, they were fast. If they made any sound, it was drowned by the howling tempest. Within seconds, he knew how those Spartans must have felt. He was outnumbered, surrounded by enemies he did not understand, and had a very bad feeling that they could do far worse than just kill him.

The creatures that approached the car could easily be seen as zombies. Not slavering monsters like in the movies, but damned odd people who shared blank stares of hostility from faces that all seemed to have some awful disease. He knew perfectly well zombies didn’t exist, but that guy had ripped off his own fucking arm, for God’s sake, and he wasn’t even out of action! His teeth were too long, his face was a wreck, and he was strong. Too god-damned strong to be human. To Ras’ addled mind the idea didn’t seem all that strange. Kirk and Rita had warned him, after all. And he hadn’t listened; his mom had always said he never listened. And now he was going to die.

It occurred to him to try starting the engine, and to his surprise it dutifully cranked right up. He belatedly noticed the steep angle at which the car rested, but decided he had nothing to lose. The first of the newcomers crashed onto the roof and began pounding like a jackhammer, denting the roof with each hit. Now they pounded on every window. He knew they would get in if he stayed here.

He hit reverse and floored it, but only went back a few feet before the landslide debris stopped him. He went to first and hit the gas again, trying to break free in one shot, but even with four-wheel drive his tires began to spin. The weight of his attackers was holding him down. Rain hammered the car again, and waves of water washed the windshield clean. The creatures leapt on the bucking vehicle and slid off again, and he was running them over, hearing bones crunch as the wind, seemingly jealous of the competition, battered at all of them.

Fear energized him as he jammed the gears back and forth. The back glass exploded and one of the – fuck it, they were zombies – one of the zombies was halfway in. He heard a high screeching and realized it was himself wailing. He slipped the clutch in reverse and when he slammed into the boulder behind him the horrid creature flew backwards into the storm. He’d crushed that one, but more were scrambling to get in through the same hole. They would be on him in seconds, and he knew what would happen. “In no time,” Marfa had said, “de demons, dey eat de girl.” They would fucking eat him. He was still wailing like a lost soul. He did not want to die eaten alive, torn apart like a zebra on the plains.

A sound he remembered seemed to come from up the hill. He was sure it was his imagination; there was no way he was hearing a genuine US-made automatic rifle here in the wilds of Dominica. Definitely an M16, set for three-round bursts like the pros do. It wasn’t until a round came through the gaping back glass and took out his right rear window, as in right behind his head, that he actually believed it. Damn it, he thought of the second window gone. Now I’m gonna have to pay for that too!

The zombies were dropping around the car as the firing came nearer. Ras backed the solid little four-wheel hard against the rocks behind him, and a squishy crunch told him the body of the one who had broken the back window was still there. So it was possible to kill them, he thought, far too calmly. Then, with a shout, he stomped the gas and let the engine roar before he dumped the clutch. With nothing held back, the sweet little truck bounded out of the hole like a scared rabbit, and he spun to a stop a little downso in the field.

He switched the headlights on, eyes snapping all around for signs of more enemies. Nothing, and the landslide hadn’t come this far. The field was clear. It had never rained like this in Vietnam, and by God he’d seen some rain there. All the enemies there, he thought wildly, had been alive at the time – at least until he and the rest of the armed forces of the United States of America had gotten hold of them, and then they were dead, and they had had the decency to stay dead, as far as he knew. Right this second that seemed like a very professional way for a soldier to act, and he had more respect for the Cong than ever. At least you never had to kill them more than once.

He heard more firing and he cut the lights, but he was sure he’d seen a small figure in a hooded jacket banging proficiently away at the flitting figures who didn’t run away. Ras turned the car left, angling up towards the road down-hill from the landslide. His wheels slipped and the Suzuki slid crazily but he horsed it up the muddy incline, working the clutch in and out. He didn’t care who was killing those fuckers or why. He was just thrilled to know they could be killed at all. His head hurt, and he was getting angry, very angry. Every dip and bump sent bolts of agony through his skull. His broken nose oozed snot and blood. He was seeing double.

When he got to the road, he couldn’t get across the concrete ditch. He had to make for the nearest dirt side-track, and hope there was no stream to stop him. There wasn’t, and he whimpered with relief. He bumped up the rise and onto the track, groaning as the vehicle rocked and bobbed. He only had to go a few hundred feet to his left, and he would be back on what passed for the main road, below the destruction from the landslide. With that tiny release of tension his eyes began to close. It should have been obvious to him he had a concussion. If he had not been drunk, stoned, traumatized, and terrified, he just might, with all his training, have known it.

— 18 —

He’d gone to the capital city, Roseau, a second time on Monday. When he came to the bus stop where the Bells Road met the Marigot Road, a heavy black fellow with a round, bald head and a fat hand on a schoolgirl’s arm hailed him like he would a cabbie. Ras pulled to the side on his left and congratulated himself on his mastery of the reversed driving patterns. The man wore a blue, long-sleeved shirt, grey tweed pants, and a pink tie. He might as well have had a neon sign saying “I’m from the city!” above his head. No one in the “country” dressed like that. He looked ridiculous. His armpits and the back of his shirt were dark with sweat.

The girl was beautiful. Her golden skin glistened in the fine mist that preceded the afternoon rains. She was perhaps sixteen years old and dressed in the plaid skirt and white blouse of many of the local religious schools. Still a lot of Catholics left from the times the Portuguese ran the island. The blouse stood out so that any man would notice, and the skirt couldn’t hide the womanly curves of her ass. She had a sweet face and long black hair, which lay in a braid down her back. The fat man told Ras where to take the girl, just like there was no question he would do it. He couldn’t believe it. This fool was putting a child from every American pervert’s sexual fantasy into a stranger’s hands without a second’s thought. He guessed then that the guy was looking to screw the girl’s mother, who was probably working upso cutting bananas, and he wanted to get rid of the girl to do it. The rich town men often had their hillside mommas. Ras couldn’t understand much of what the guy was saying, but he figured the girl could tell him where she needed to be let out; after all, there was only one road to Roseau.

Belles cutoff to the bus stop on Marigot Road

He tried to speak to the girl and, as he had often done, cursed his refusal to learn more French. She was telling him to take her to “Royere.” He could make no sense of it, nor find anything like it on the map. “¿Habla Español?” he asked. “Si,” she replied expectantly. “¿Donde quere voy?” She retorted with a barrage of Spanish he couldn’t follow. He shook his head. He had heard what sounded like “Royer,” but that was it. “Pense que habias dicho que podias hablar espanol,” she said, very slowly, as if she were speaking to a child whose language skills were less than average. That, he understood: I thought you said you could speak Spanish. He didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.

They continued in silence down the mountain, past the upso road where Osama bin Laden had kept house with Saddam Hussein, past where the prissy Belgians had their really beautiful estate, an explosion of flowers in a land so full of flowers already that to stand out was an accomplishment. They came to a sign that said “Roger,” and the girl tapped him primly on the shoulder. He wanted to stick his finger up his nose in disgust. A perfectly good Anglo-Saxon name and he couldn’t pick it from the Spanish or the French. As they descended into the town of Roger, he spotted some letters spray-painted in red on the dumpster by the road. Dumpsters were rare. As the distance closed, he read: “No babies. No Animals.”

He dropped the girl off at a long white wall across from an incredible view of the Caribbean rolling tranquilly onto the shore below. Above the wall, she said, was the house of her father. In his rearview mirror Ras watched the beautiful island girl climb the hill just back of the house behind the nice white wall. The mansion above it was not her father’s house; she disappeared into the jungle far up the mountain, no doubt heading for another shanty in the woods. Her fine legs glowed in the sun under her plaid skirt. He told himself she was no older than his daughters. Would be. Would have been. He drove away down the hill.

A little way farther on was a pile of garbage, which was a chronic problem on the island. There simply was no room for dead babies or dead animals in the island’s few dumpsters. Having no regular waste disposal, the locals either dumped their trash down the nearest ravine or in a spot along the road where everybody else put theirs, as if they’d all agreed on it. Like right here, downso from the girl’s house. And let’s face it, Ras thought grimly, without regular pickup, either babies or animals would have made a dumpster really, really nasty.

Ras was more comfortable now, driving on the wrong side of the road and all, and he could take a little time and pay attention to the fabulous flowers and trees. He passed the rusting hulk of a red tilt-bed tow truck that had obviously crashed into a tree at high speed, going up the mountain. Vines were growing on it, putting off bursts of red flowers. Ras could not imagine how the truck could gain enough speed up the tortured hill to wreck like that, but he remembered the local saying: “Never underestimate the power of rum.” The road here was a series of switchbacks, snaking up and down a treacherous hillside. And forget “here,” he thought. All the roads in Dominica were like this. There were maybe three or four miles of straight, level road, total, on the whole island.

Downso from Roger was Canefield Estate, once a sugar cane plantation and the only spot on the island other than Melville Hall with enough flat land for an airport, though only enough for small aircraft, which had to land along the beach, practically in the water. It was now called, rather ingeniously he thought, Canefield Airport. Dropping towards the waterfront highway to Roseau, he zig-zagged between ragged buildings, mostly of plywood. Signs for Suki’s Propane Gas competed with those from Blue Rhino Gas, Mellow Yellow Soda, Kubuli Beer, and Colgate Toothpaste. The capital had a Colgate factory and every islander got free toothpaste and toothbrushes from Colgate-Palmolive. Some of the older folks still had bad teeth, but among the young bad teeth were unheard of.

The coast road leading to Canefield Airport

There was some new graffiti on the walls, on bus stops, and on the backs of signs. “Sylvia AIDS.” “Sylvia HIV.” “Plague on Sylvia.” It was all in the same shade of blue spray paint. It surely sucked to be Sylvia these days. The last sharp curve spilled him onto the coastal road to Roseau. The capital was named after a type of cane, but not sugar cane. Roseau cane had thick, woody stalks that bled red sap when cut, thus the French name, roseau, or “red water.” Roseau had once been shipped as far away as Portugal to be used for rafters. To this day it held up many a roof in Dominica, including Kirk’s. None other than Tia, builder of bamboo houses, had told Ras that roseau, too, had to be cut at the right time of the moon or it would soon rot and be eaten by insects.

The road, the best in Dominica, was the same road that ran to the Prime Minister’s house, south of the capital. At the mouth of the Roseau River, Ras drove between what his map described as “Mining Wall” on his right, between him and the “Jetty,” and “Port Storage Tanks” on his left, up the hill. “Mining Wall” would not obstruct the view of the Jetty for long, as it was currently being devoured by ravenous yellow machines with giant wheels and teeth. Perfectly spaced gouges in the cliff face showed where so much “Mining Wall” had been turned into building material to date.

The metal bridge across the Roseau River into the capital was a rare one, because it had more than one lane, and boasted rails. Most bridges in the country had no railings, because the flash floods, which were so common, would just destroy them anyway. As you approached a bridge in Dominica, or a mountain curve for that matter, you honked your horn and proceeded with caution if you knew what was good for you. Here and there you might see a car rusting away near a bridge or down a steep slope below a curve, testament to the fate of incautious drivers who, presumably, had not known what was good for them.

The metal bridge across the Roseau River into the capital

Farther south, away from the construction, the cliffs to his left grew steeper, then dropped away to the oceanfront, and he came upon the cave. Hardly even a cave really, just a depression in the cliffs, barely enough cover to keep a man out of the rain, and there was one serious boatload of rain on this island. The little black man in the ragged blue pants and the white rag of a shirt was there, as he always was, sleeping beside his tiny, smoky fire. Shiny new guard rails separated his squalid paradise from the sterile technology of asphalt and cars only a few yards away. Once again Ras considered trading lives with someone. Why not live in a little cave beside the road, drinking rum every day until you could sleep on the rocks? Who was he to say?

He went to Bryzees’ and stood in the long, sweating lines of black people, waiting to purchase his food for the next few days, and maybe get a fried leg of chicken at the kiosk in the parking lot. He knew he had to stand up for himself at the kiosk; if a white man didn’t elbow his way into the line, both the other customers and the vendors would ignore him, not that Ras held it against them. Hey, it was their country, and they kissed no white man’s ass, ever. He rather admired them for it. He then went to Astaphan’s, down the street, to buy the more durable bulk goods he might need, like toilet paper and alcohol. After standing in line and sweating with the black folks there, he ordered two cases of the little green Kubulis, and a case of Orange Crush for Kirk. Then he took his bags and steered the car around the corner into the lot with the big roll-up warehouse doors, where they took his receipt and let him put his cases of drinks in the back of the car. The warehouse boys – sweating, muscular black youths with perfect rows of gleaming teeth and not an ounce of fat among them – carried the drinks for the locals, especially the fine young women. He could, he knew, fucking well hump his own as far as those boys were concerned. He smiled and joked with them while he did it. He truly liked these people and was gratified when they seemed to like him back.

He had spent a total of one hundred thirty-two EC, East Caribbean dollars, about forty bucks US. His car was jammed with food and beverage. He had to admit that Kirk, his formerly jet-setting friend, who had driven Vettes and Porsches, and flown to the Azores to the world’s premier Rave island countless times, now lived in paradise for next to nothing. It wasn’t hard; many of the locals wore rags and ate garbage. Still, the life had much to recommend it.

On the way back, the sun was low on the water, and he saw the man in the cave washing himself in the little waterfall Ras had noticed before, sliding down over the rocks at the back of the cave. These magical cascades, from diminutive trickles to immense tumultuous floods, abounded on the island, and seeing naked black people bathing in them beside the road was an everyday occurrence. He had been stopping regularly to do head-dips in these cool mountain falls. It helped clear his head from all the rum, the Kubilis, and the ever-present reefer.

— 19 —

A dull thumping snatched him awake. He recoiled in dazed terror from a dark figure at his window. His frantic twisting of the ignition key produced a screech he could hear above the wail of the storm; the engine was already running. Ras scrabbled at the gearshift but could not seem to put the necessary motions together. His feet would not operate properly. His hands betrayed him, wandering aimlessly in search of brake lever and wheel, recognizing nothing, while his mind shrieked helplessly. Death was near. He cried out when he heard someone, something, climbing in through the broken rear window. Tears rolled down his already streaming face, into his slack and quavering mouth. He could taste the salt in them. Death was here and was going to eat him.

The hand on his shoulder set him to screaming. He tried to block it, use his brutal martial arts experience to break more bones, rip off more arms if necessary, but his limbs flailed weakly, ineffective in his time of need. The hand did not move, but a soothing voice, the caramel-smooth accent somehow calming, was telling him to relax.

“Stop eet, stop,” crooned the voice. Ras could hear the plastic of the cheap rain jacket crackling. He turned in silent terror. It was the hooded shooter. His rifle was a sharp, dark point in the shadows beside him. In his injured state, a fellow soldier with an American-made weapon was Ras’ best possible dream. He might have wept in relief. Maybe he did. Later, he couldn’t remember.

In the dark he couldn’t see the man. There was something wrong with Ras’ eyes. His night vision was semi-legendary, at least to himself. His impression was of a small, lithe person who somehow maneuvered Ras’ bulky white ass from the driver’s seat over to the left and then took the wheel. The little SUV bucked a few times and then began to move, excruciatingly slowly, up the scattered remnants of ancient pavement that made up the side road. Ras mindlessly puked stinking rum on the passenger’s side floorboard and once again passed out.

— 20 —

Oh, he had checked with the government about Uncle Charlie all right. The capitol building stretched for two entire blocks along the waterfront across from the boardwalk on Dame Eugenia Charles Boulevard. It was just down from the fish house and Saturday market in Roseau, a flat, grey granite block, three imposing stories high. On the north corner was a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada. A battalion of window air conditioners in every window hummed like angry bees, dripping water on disgusted tourists and indifferent locals alike. At the south corner stood a tall, handsome Rasta man with truly awesome dreadlocks piled high upon his head, on top of which sat a ridiculously tiny red ballcap. He asked each American, European, or rich Caribbean tourist if they would like to buy some ganja, de best in de island mon, cheap too! Ras politely waved him off, saying his friends lived here and he had his own. Like with so many islanders, this brought a wide smile; anyone who had sense enough to be more than just a tourist was a welcome novelty. At the north corner, by the doors to the bank, stood a gigantic, rotund, jet-black Congolese policeman. His round, dripping face scanned the crowd. He was sweating profusely all over his perfectly tailored uniform of dark serge pants and pastel blue shirt, complete with tie, badges, and a silver whistle on a neck-loop.

The policeman had something wrong with his eyes. He did not seem to see the Rasta man selling ganja at all. Ras assumed this visual impairment on the part of the officer was not congenital, or the result of some disease, but was actually paid for, handsomely, and he was not wrong. When the crazy lady spouting Bible verses approached him, the American tourist in expensive clothes, the fat policeman was in her face in a second, waving a finger and threatening jail. Apparently, she had not paid for his selective blindness; he could see her just fine. Later, on his way back up the mountain, he saw the same Rasta, riding home in the back of a transport, what they called a pickup here, with five or six others. He just grinned and waved as Ras passed them, speeding along uphill at all of thirty miles an hour. Kirk had told him how it worked.

Early on Sunday mornings, before decent Catholic islanders even went to Church, teenage Rastafarian boys could be seen zipping down the mountain roads on expensive American and French racing bicycles, each sporting bulging rear baskets and each boy wearing a large backpack. Such bicycles were never seen on the streets of most towns here. Those nice backpacks weren’t common either. Nobody but Rastas could afford them. When Ras asked Kirk what was going on there, Kirk had almost sneered at him.

“I left Melbourne and there was this sharp operator who used to off massive amounts of my weed. Where the fuck is that guy? Did you get stupid or something?” The backpacks were full of the finest local weed, Kirk said, and the boys were going into town to distribute it to their local dealers. As profitable as the tourist trade was, it paled next to the local revenue. It was also a gang thing – the Goodwill Road Riders, the “Gs” – against the Independence Patriots, or the “Pats.” The boys from upso were the Goodwill Riders. Until they came to the bridge at the Roseau River, the road was Goodwill Road. Over the bridge, it became Independence Street. It didn’t help that at the soccer matches, the Gs wore red, and the Pats wore green. Whenever they could, the Pats would snag a Rider and steal his stash, steal his bike, beat his ass, just never kill him. By Dominican law, children under eighteen could not be charged with any felony other than murder. That was why the young dudes did the transportation. Unless they killed someone, they could only be charged with a misdemeanor, no matter how much weed or cash they had. And the same went for the bad-ass teens who hunted them.

Why Sunday? Kirk just grinned at him. “You really don’t get it, do you? The police stations are closed on Sundays, man! I mean closed! Like, nobody there! Besides, the cops have to buy their grass sometime, don’t they? Is this a great country or what?” Kirk then, for once, turned serious. “Don’t ever run from the cops here. Just hold up your hands and smile. Don’t even make them search you. Just give them anything you’ve got and keep smiling. Jail here is a joke, you’ll be out by dinner time, but don’t you run from them.” Ras had never seen his friend so concerned. “You may have noticed, every cop in Dominica looks like a fucking black Adonis. That’s because they are. They play soccer for blood and money, and every damned one of them is an incredible athlete. They will run you down, straight up the mountain, without breaking a sweat. Then, for making them chase you, they will beat you so bad your momma won’t know you. The sound you hear over your screams will be your bones breaking. Don’t run from them.”

Ras knew good advice when he heard it, and damn their muscular asses, there were in fact boatloads of black Adonises in this island, not just the cops, but just about all of the men. The women might run to fat, but a fat man was rarely seen; even the Congolese cops, round as they were, were in incredible shape compared to most Americans. It was a sorry island lad indeed who didn’t make the average American tourist look like the cholesterol-soaked slab of bacon that he was. As if, he thought, he would ever try to run from cops anyway. Hell, except for the weed, he was the most law-and-order guy on the block.

Downtown Roseau

So now Ras stood in a line of sweating black folks in the lobby of the capitol building, inside the doors guarded so assiduously by the massive policeman with the selective eye problem. When he finally arrived at the front of the line and presented his questions, the hot Carib babe behind the counter gave him a blank look that did not encourage him at all. The government of the Commonwealth of Dominica had no record of Charles Osbourne Dayton, as a citizen, resident, or visitor to Dominica, now or at any time in the past. Nor did they recognize the life or death of one Regina Queen Fontain Dayton, alleged native of the Commonwealth of Dominica and alleged wife of the aforesaid Charles, anywhere, ever. Ras was amazed at the glittering array of officials, crisp from their air-conditioned offices, who came out to tell the sweaty American, who was clearly nobody, good clothes or not, that his kin had never come here, never lived here, and most certainly never died here. Even more interesting was the fact that they had no knowledge of any series of murders in the area of Attley, not in the seventies, not ever, and they were not at all pleased to have to tell him so. Such vicious gossip, they said, was detrimental to the image of the Commonwealth of Dominica as a safe, welcoming Jungle Paradise. The very idea that anyone ever killed anyone in Dominica clearly upset them greatly, and to have a white American asking them about it clearly upset them even more. Ras didn’t care what they said. He had money, he was having fun, and he was determined, before he left this place, that he would find out for his mother what had happened to her brother Charlie.

— 21 —

He lay on his back on something hard and warm while a tireless chimpanzee rhythmically pounded his forehead with a pair of hammers. He figured the hammers had to weigh about five pounds each. He struggled an eye open and a supernova blinded him from maybe ten feet away. A grinding roar assaulted his ears, rose to a shattering explosion of pain, and retreated. Then it exploded again. And again. He couldn’t see the chimpanzee, yet the hammers kept landing squarely on his skull. It seemed as if the beast was growing larger, stronger, or maybe its morbid task was just becoming more enjoyable.

The calm, silky voice from the night, that night, spoke to him. “Here, you mus’ drink dis.” A mild hand held his thudding, excruciating head, while a warm concoction was poured down his choking gullet. It tasted like rum with honey and smelled like every spice in the world, including the dreaded marijuana. A creeping warmth moved slowly through his aching frame. He was seeing double, but both the men he saw were brown, bald, smaller than average, and were wearing ragged blue pants with matching, filthy, torn white shirts. He had been rescued by none other than the old drunk from the cave in the cliff outside Roseau.

— 22 —

When he had missed the plane, he’d taken a room at the Hummingbird Hotel, just upso the Marigot Road from Melville Hall. It was a charming set of lodges on stilts located at different levels up and down the mountain. He had learned that every mountain in Dominica was simply “the mountain,” while context sufficed to determine which mountain. Wandering walkways on this mountain were bordered by hedges burdened with staggering loads of gorgeous flowers.

View from the balcony of the Hummingbird Hotel
looking north towards Guadeloupe

Dim lights and tepid fans stirred the humid air in his room, powered poorly by starving solar panels farther up the mountain. Whatever Einstein had decided solar panels were a good alternative on an island with more annual rainfall than anywhere on Earth except Thailand had to have been one greenie-weenie idiot. The entire country was provided with cheap, perfectly clean electrical power by hydroelectric plants. They were run from the two lakes in the highlands to the south around Morne Macaque. He’d seen the huge pipes their drinking water ran through, from the same lakes. They were made of tarred wood, wedge-shaped timbers bound together with iron straps, and they seemed to work just fine. Just like the old wooden sailing ships, the fact that the wood was constantly waterlogged kept leakage to a minimum.

The night before the hurricane had hit, he’d enjoyed a magnificent dinner of crab-back, callaloo, and stewed goat over rice, al fresco under the overhang at the main house. The fare was whatever the house served that night, whose identity was posted at the entrance to the dining area. There was no menu to choose from. Ras had been the only white man at the tables, the underdressed white surfer-dude in the company of witty and sophisticated black islanders from Barbados, Trinidad, and Grenada. When the callaloo had been served, he hadn’t been given a bowl, and had had to ask for it. The staff had seemed to think that either he would not want it, it being an island dish, or he was not capable of appreciating it. Ras had no intention of missing out on anything. He had no idea what it was and had only learned later that this delicious soup was made from the spade-shaped leaves of the otherwise revolting dasheen root.

Highly educated and quite rich, the men were urbane in white pants and long-sleeved white, buttoned-down shirts and matching sport coats, which each and every one of them hung on the backs of their chairs. And, to his amazement, they sported high white collars shamefully shackled in black bow ties. This blatant oppression was presided over by oblivious straw boater hats. It is the year two thousand four, he thought disgustedly, with his finely tuned anti-establishment mental sarcasm. Will we never become civilized? These men and their families were mimicking the Europeans who had brutally oppressed and enslaved their own ancestors. He wished Kirk were here to appreciate the utter irony.

He considered himself enlightened and liberated, in no small part because he hadn’t worn a necktie in decades. The last tie he’d owned had been a black silk monstrosity festooned with colorful hot-pepper prints. He only wore it for weddings and funerals and had long since stopped wearing it even then. He hadn’t even worn it for the funerals of his wife and daughters, and he couldn’t have said where that one tie was now. He and Kirk had worn ties wrapped around their heads like headbands one day in the 1969 school year, and the angry reaction they had gotten from the teachers and the vice principal, Coach Martin, had really surprised them. They had quoted the dress code like the little wise-asses they were: the wearing of neckties was perfectly acceptable, and not one word prescribed in what fashion they were to be worn. Nothing prohibited what they were doing. They had later decided that it was precisely because the teachers all had to wear ties that it had pissed them off so badly. They had not been told they couldn’t wear ties that way to school, but they never did it again. Ras hated ties. Studies showed they cut off blood to the brain; he surmised that the losers who wore them only wanted you to wear them so you would be as stupid as they were.

The ladies were big-breasted and smoking hot. Ebony beauties lounged suggestively about in tight, colorful, and damn near transparent silk shifts that left almost nothing to the imagination, and his imagination was working overtime in the heat. Jeweled necklines lost altitude so rapidly, little designer oxygen masks, Ras was positive, must certainly pop out of the overhead at any second. He definitely needed some air on an occasion or two, and this island had the cleanest air on Earth.

Perfectly behaved children, exact clones of their parents, ate gracefully, not spilling a drop on snowy white clothes he would not have expected to see on rich kids at church in America. A serene Masai princess towered over the other women from the side of her ponderous Congolese husband, granting gratuitous and condescending glances over a bosom he could have landed a small helicopter on. The only one on whom she did not condescend to glance was, of course, Ras himself. He might as well have been one of the potted palms. Her steaming legs stretched all the way back to Africa. This magical landscape of skin and melatonin was lit by soft candlelight, a scene from the Arabian Nights, and the air was as still as a summer’s eve in Paradise.

It had been as hot as the brass gates of Hell that night, not at all like up in the highlands. After dinner, in his steam-bath of a room, he went out on the porch and lay in the hammock, singing some old tunes to ease his mind. The couple in the other half of his duplex bungalow were Dutch and on their honeymoon. They were all the talk at dinner, which they had missed, due to a late return from an excursion to the Boiling Lake and being the only other white people at the hotel that night. The lady asked him pointedly if he would stop singing, as they were tired from the arduous hike to the one sight he had not personally seen on the island, and for which he was already a bit jealous. He was irritated; generally, people liked his singing. And it was only half-past eight in the evening, when most civilized human beings were just getting bathed before even thinking about dinner. In a moment of weakness, thinking of his and Tabitha’s own honeymoon and their trip to Busch Gardens, he agreed.

He suffered through a night of exquisite misery, what he thought of as the Chinese Sweat Torture. His sunken woolen mattress might have been a sodden bathtub. On the wall behind the bed was a painting of a beach, with the ocean in the background and in the foreground a young man with his back turned grasped the rail of a boat while on the other side of the boat, a boy rolled a rope. In the background, tiny figures enjoyed a tropical scene. Pink bikinis fairly burst with ripe black skin, against the blue of the water. Crudely done palm trees waved against an azure sky. The look on the boy’s face was somehow threatening. His smile was a little too wide, his teeth a little too long to be quite real. He seemed to have either a fixation on the young man’s crotch or an urge to kill him. Or maybe he wanted to kill the person looking at the painting.

The tiny 12-volt light, hampered by the pathetic solar panels, was not bright enough to read his Wilbur Smith novel. It was sufficiently luminous, however, to see the crazed homosexual murderer painted on the wall.

Ras swung the bamboo window up to smoke from one of his dwindling supply of joints. He’d expected to be off the island now and was running low on dope. Looking down from the window, he saw moonlight inking a comic-book tropical landscape. Psychotic crisscrosses of jet-black bars of shadow were offset by the silver tinsel icing of the white moonlight. He spotted the scuttling orange land crabs from which the restaurant had made the crab-back. The crabs relentlessly searched the drenched, rooty earth for the baby lizards, frogs, and tadpoles they loved to eat. They mostly had to settle for coconuts and bananas like everything else, but like everything else in Dominica it was meat they really craved.

He laughed to himself, the smoke from his weed curling upward in the still air, as he remembered the waitress responding to his question at dinner: what is crab-back? The lovely island girl, with more than a hint of the Carib Indian in her features, turned her head a little, as if searching for a way to speak to a backward child. “Do you know what is crab?” Yes, he’d responded, his humor growing with her irritation, he knew what crab was. She had held her hand out, palm up, curved like a scoop. “It is de back, de back of de crab.” Stuffed, he had found, with the marvelously spiced crab meat, and baked to perfection, worthy of the finest restaurant in Miami. He had felt it was prudent to ask; he’d been at one place along the road from Bells to Roseau, Mama Serena’s, where the menu began with “Bull’s foot soup.” It went on to include “fish water,” “devil’s goat,” and a host of other unspeakable local specialties that Kirk had warned him to avoid as if they carried syphilis. The only things he ever bought at Mama Serena’s were Kubulis and rum.

The Dutch newlyweds were up with the dawn, at almost the exact microsecond Ras had finally gotten his sweat-racked body into a semblance of sleep. He shouted at them and their thoughtless crashing about. They looked at him as if he had escaped from a psychiatric ward. He slammed the bamboo shutters in their outraged young faces. Assholes. Fucking foreigners.

He’d finally left late that morning, in the wind and rain, to get more reefer from Kirk up in Bells. To hold him over, you know, until he could get a flight out. First he had gone to the airport downso in Melville Hall, only to be told he could not book a seat, there were no planes flying. Why? Because there was a storm, said the handsome young man at the counter diffidently, as if indeed, as the Dutch couple seemed to think, he was an escapee from a mental institution. A slim, aristocratic white fellow with premature grey hair behind him in line asked if he had a reservation. Thinking he was in competition for a seat with any other tourist, Ras was short with him. At fifty-four years, regardless of being in tip-top shape, he was too god-damned old to lose a whole night of sleep without being crabby. Despite his rudeness, the man calmly explained that if he had no fixed reservation or did not care if he lost it, he might get a short hop to another island with a larger airport. From someplace like Martinique or Barbados, with an international airport, he might get a flight to the States sooner.

For the first time, Ras really looked at the other man. His clothes were nice but not overly expensive, yet he bargained with the airport employees like he owned the place. Again and again he named Caribbean ports to which he might escape. Handsome black lads and stunning black ladies searched the schedules desperately for any possible way to accommodate him but could in the end only shake their heads. The voluptuous ticket manager nearly burst the buttons on her tight blue American Airlines jacket as she despondently informed Mr. Astaphan that she could not get him a flight. Her manner indicated that, should he require a good long frolic in the sack to compensate for the inconvenience, it would not be out of the question.

When Ras saw the man who he suddenly understood was the richest man in Dominica told no to his face, he finally abandoned hope and drove back up the mountain past the Hummingbird. It wasn’t like the gorgeous ticket manager was going to make him the same offer. He knew he needed more weed if he was going to be socked in, and figured he’d better get it from Kirk now, before whatever storm was coming decided to hit. He had possessed not the slightest idea there was a hurricane; for Christ’s sake it rained here all the damned time. Now if it had not rained, that he might have noticed. Most of his shit, including his camera, was still at the hotel.

— 23 —

The boy’s hungry, murderous eyes from the painting on the wall of the Hummingbird Hotel appeared before Ras in his own dark hell now, and the American struggled weakly until another cup of drugged rum was forced compassionately down his throat. “Dey almos’ got you, you know.” It was the smooth island voice of the rifleman from the landslide. Ras turned his head, and this time the light did not slam his eyes completely closed. “Ahh, ’oo ah you..?”

“Don’ worry aboot me, my friend, de question is, who are you? Or radder, who will you be? Will you be you again, or will you be someone like Georgia?” Given his earlier nonchalance about such a fate, Ras was now astounded to realize just how much he did not wish to enter Georgia’s world, however much comfort it might provide. The soft, soothing voice came again.

“One way or de odder, I certainly hope you will be useful. Big, strong killers like you be useful, but den again Georgia very useful as well, jus’ in a different way.” The slim black man was familiar in the dim light of the cave, with a muted roaring in the background, as if the traffic of a major highway came from outside. There was no such highway in Dominica. Cave, Ras’ mind echoed, as if inside a…cave. The thundering was the sound of the tropical storm, and of waves assaulting the beach right across the highway. Across the highway from the cave of the old man he had thought was just a drunken old derelict. Who had somehow turned into a warrior with real balls, a true fighter, with both skill and luck. And lots of ammunition. The derelict who had saved Ras’ life. He wanted to get up and give the brave little fellow a hug, but he could only struggle up to a sitting position and lean against the stone wall behind him. The smell of saltwater spray was like a presence in the cave.

The man wore ragged blue cutoff pants and the remnants of a white shirt, both soaked, and he rubbed his face with fine-boned hands, looking very tired. Even though only one of Ras’ eyes seemed to be working correctly, there was also only one of the old man now. That had to be good. The man gave him his hand, and when Ras had settled himself and his head stopped spinning, he spoke. He still

held the delicate-seeming brown fingers in his own.

“Nah..t…like…Geo…gia.” The dark man nodded, interested. He examined Ras closely for several heartbeats, then nodded again. “It is good to see you, my friend. My name is Darius. Darius Christmas.” He retrieved his hand from Ras’. A wave of nausea swept over Ras. Darius. Cyrus put Darius on the throne. He turned his good eye on his savior. “Georgia…send me. Guess I’m…Xerxes.”

“And your name?” Darius asked. “They call me…Ras. Ras Taft….” Darius was rocking back and forth now, a look of hope, almost joy, on his narrow face. His tight brown hands pulled the skin on his face back, holding on in amazement to either side of his scalp. “Yes, I understand eet now, I could not see eet, but she said you would come…” He sat and rocked for a few moments, then continued, his grin seeming too big for his face. “But you are somet’ing much better than Xerxes. You are Ras Tafari! Eet is so wonderful to finally meet you, my son.” His old eyes wandered, seeing into days long gone. “Eet has been…twenty-five years, no, more! Eet is so, so good!” There it was again, somehow these people had gotten the idea he was the reincarnation of the patron saint of Rastafarianism, of reefer and Reggae. Tears gleamed in those dark eyes. Ras’ own eyes were swimming, slamming shut again. He couldn’t help it, in spite of wanting desperately to know more. He went to sleep, thinking, just when this whole vacation had begun to seem like a waste of time, damned if it hadn’t gone and got all interesting again.

— 24 —

Mama Geraldine had come walking up the mountain one afternoon, headed upso from the bus stop. The rains were coming, and she stopped at Kirk and Rita’s to wait for them to subside. Ras was glad to see her, because he had more floaters from Astaphan’s store in town in the refrigerator, his offering to the healing woman for her help running off Montezuma. It pleased him enormously to be thanking a “native” herbalist for helping him with his bowel problems. It made him feel rather superior, to understand the “savage mind,” as Claud Levi-Strauss had put it. Kirk and Ras put away their reefer out of deference to the old woman, although it was nothing she hadn’t seen many times. She thanked Ras for the floaters. She said she knew the heavily salted fish were bad for her, but what did she care? She was an old woman. Rita stepped right in and contradicted her. “You are not! You’re only sixty-eight years old. Why, you’re only six years older than me. Don’t you go talkin’ me old, girl!” Geraldine grinned so widely she almost did look young, and, laughing, slapped lightly on Rita’s arm. Rita could be difficult, Ras thought, but she was just so disgustingly nice. Maybe that was why he decided to ask Geraldine if she would like a ride up the mountain. He thought he would be nice too, for once.

The valiant little Suzuki zipped up the steep broken trails in the pounding rain with no hesitation. Ras could tell Geraldine was pleased; she might never before have ridden in a private car. Maybe now and then with Kelvin. He didn’t ask, for to reveal that truth might demean her, and he didn’t want to insult the old gal out of cultural ignorance. The talk among the locals was, she was a witch. Dogs had eaten her food and died. One time a local man named Olay had stopped by during lunch and accepted a plate of food. He was almost finished when Ras had mentioned that Geraldine had baked the brown bread. Olay had turned and spit the remains of it onto the ground.

Ras made the connection, later confirmed by Kirk: it was Albert who poisoned the dogs, most likely because they would kill his chickens. It was a common problem on the island; people couldn’t feed their dogs. The starving dogs killed and ate whatever they could find. Starving men who could not feed themselves or their children would no more feed dogs than they would allow those dogs to eat the little food they had. Albert used Geraldine’s well-known brown bread to poison problem dogs and let people think it was her. What an asshole.

The wipers scattered the battering rain but could not clear his view; had she not pointed it out, he would likely have missed the rutted track, flowing with water, that led at a steep angle up to her little house in the clouds. Right then the rain chose to stop, as if a giant hand had turned off a spigot in the sky. It was the way here in the highlands, rain falling like there was no end and then suddenly, nothing. The instant silence was like a whine in his ears, until the jungle sounds of the frogs and birds and lizards took up their endless chorus once again.

For the first time on this outing, he shifted the vehicle into four-wheel drive. The turn up to Geraldine’s mountain abode seemed damned near vertical in the foggy remains of the shower. The cracked remains of two ribbons of pebbly concrete ran up the hill at what seemed an impossible incline, like the ghosts of some Florida nightmare. The house in old Eau Gallie he’d grown up in had originally had a driveway like that, two concrete strips, only there were no hills in Florida. And the concrete hadn’t been broken and twisted like some sunken treasure galleon off the coast, and it hadn’t been patched with clay and mud and tarrish, the grey shale used here for cheap road repairs. These shattered remains reminded Ras of the old Flagler Railroad, rusting away over the romantic Florida Keys. Only they weren’t romantic anymore. Tabitha was no longer in this fucked-up world, and he had wasted his life with her when it could have been so good, and nothing would ever be romantic again.

When he’d walked up this way with Rita the week before and received the blessing of Mama Geraldine’s Magical Elixir, the path had seemed not nearly so ugly, although he admitted that four-wheel drive made the climb far easier than it had been on foot. That turned out to be a problem for Albert, who came out the front door in his underwear, a shocked expression on his hairy black face. The ragged jockey shorts couldn’t hide his raging erection, and when Sofia appeared in the doorway with no bottom on at all, Ras couldn’t hide his disgust. Apparently, Albert knew just how long Geraldine would normally be gone, which gave him ample time to take out his perverse desires on the helpless girl, who was without the power of speech to tell anyone what he did to her when her mother wasn’t around. Only this time, the rich American had given Geraldine a ride, something Albert hadn’t counted on. Sofia’s purple tee shirt was pulled up to show her pointed, adolescent breasts. One finger was in her mouth, and another was in her vagina, at the womanly bush in her crotch, which was wet and matted. She was making that noise again: “Unhh. Unhh. Unhh.” Was that what Albert sounded like when he was on top of her?

Mama Geraldine sat like a stone in the left seat. Her glare, even through the windshield, should have caused Albert to burst into flames on the spot. The rain started back up, pattering on the roof of the car as if to remind the world to start moving again. Then, without a word, Geraldine picked up the floaters Ras had bought her in town and got determinedly out of the car. She ignored the rain now pouring over her lined face, staring at Albert and Sofia. Albert made a show of directing their “visitor” how to turn around in the cramped space at the top of the hill, but Ras knew Albert was busted. Toast. Ras had ample opportunity, later, to consider just how badly burned Albert really was.

Albert died ten days after Ras drove Mama Geraldine up the hill in the rain. The doctors said it was his heart. The locals now knew for a fact Geraldine was a witch. Oh, the story had got around but fast; Ras went to Bells two days after giving Geraldine the floaters and every mouth stopped talking, every eye was on the white man from America. He thought nothing much of it; he knew any white man stood out like a whore at a wedding. Later he understood. Rita reluctantly attended the funeral, only to support Geraldine, and upon her return sarcastically remarked how there “wasn’t a wet eye in the place.” Ras figured if she had poisoned the old pervert with the same rat bait he had used to kill dogs, it was no more than he deserved. Mama Geraldine soon began wearing her native garb, brilliant puffy dresses sporting African hues, and head wraps which made her look much younger. Geraldine was ready to start dating again.

— 25 —

“You should get up, my son. Try to walk a bit.” It was dark outside. No cars disturbed the rhythmic beating of the mild surf on the rocky beach across the road. When Ras got to the mouth of the little cave, he could see branches and leaves piled in drifts across the highway. No lights shone from the port area, to their right less than a mile up the highway. There were always lights at the port. A few stars struggled vainly against ragged, running clouds, to reflect even a flat, steely glimmer from the reluctant Caribbean. Ras felt vaguely human for the first time in three days. He knew he had shit himself at least twice and pissed buckets of the tea and rum concoctions forced down him by Darius while his brain healed and the hurricane rampaged outside. At one point he had thought maybe the water had come right up to what he thought of as the door to their little hideaway, but he couldn’t be sure what had been real and what a product of his addled skull. The island man had cared for him, cleaned him, not let him lie in his own mess and be dishonored. He could not talk about it with this man, to thank him, this man he did not know but who was now his brother in a way only soldiers can be.

Ras remarked how lucky they were to be on the leeward side of the island, where the wind from the hurricane had screamed over their heads from the east. Darius solemnly agreed. Ras remarked on the illusion the cave presented from the road. The shallow depression visible to travelers hid a sideways entrance to a house-sized cavern, unknown to any but the old man. “It is a blessing, to be able to hide like dis,” Darius had replied. The tiny waterfall which hid the entrance to the larger cavity was, they concurred, the finishing touch to a perfect hideout. Ultimately it was time to broach the subject as to what was really the matter at hand.

“But from whom, my father,” asked Ras, using the term for the first time, “are we hiding?” Darius threw his head back and laughed, his mouth wide and teeth gleaming. “You told me de Jesuits wanted you to join dem, and I can see why Dominicans always be de mendicants, Jesuits de speakers, de debaters. You dangle none of your participles, my son. I hope you fail to dangle your disciples as carefully.” The Bible again, the American thought. There was a silence between them for a while. Finally, Ras had to ask that first question, the one that would make the nightmare real. He thought about it for a long time. Five minutes. Well, maybe two. He was afraid he already knew the answer. “What the fuck were those things?” Darius looked up into the darkness, letting out a little snort.

“Zombs, my son, what rich Americans call ‘zombies’. Dey amuse demselves wit’ what dey call fiction while we battle demons and die. Novelists in de States gettin’ rich, pokin’ fun at our troubles here, true dat. Honestly, it beginnin’ to piss us off. Respect.” The compact brown warrior tapped himself on the chest with his right fist, something Ras had only seen a few times. He sensed a set of rules with which he was totally unfamiliar. His brilliant wit rose to new heights with his suave reply. “Zombies?” Darius shook his head in obvious disgust. “You be listenin’ to a got-damned t’ing I be tellin’ ya?”

That night Ras dreamed. In his dream he asked God why He was keeping Ras’ humble self on this shithole island. He really didn’t think of it as a shithole; Ras thought the island was just what its poor but happy inhabitants thought it was: the Garden of Eden. Heaven on Earth. But God took him at his word in the dream and answered him plainly. “You need to be here. There is great evil to be fought, and you’re good at that. Besides, you were rude to my man Primm.” Ras was about to ask who the fuck Primm was, but he thought that would be disrespectful, and by then God was gone anyway. He awoke, pondering the irony that God concerned Himself with the way people treated each other on this miserable little ball of dirt. Had He somehow screwed up?

— 26 —

November 4th is Independence Day in Dominica. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January the first, eighteen sixty-three, he likely had no idea the effect it would have on the entire world. When word of it reached the island on August twenty-second, eighteen sixty-three, the slaves in Dominica revolted. The black slaves in the lower parishes, St. Joseph, St. Paul, and St. George, had followed a man named Jaco. Jaco had led them high into the interior mountains to a steep valley with only two ways in, each over a narrow ridge.

Olay, who had spit out Geraldine’s bread, had told them his friend, Kent, would guide them to Jaco Steps for a nominal fee. Kent, it turned out, was six feet-eight inches tall and lived in a house exactly two sheets of plywood long and two sheets of plywood wide. Eight feet by eight feet. Termite tunnels drew hieroglyphs on the unpainted walls, but for a destitute shack in the butt-end of nowhere, Ras had to respectfully concede Kent’s aluminum roof was surprisingly serviceable. At least his stuff was dry. Whatever goods he might have cherished in such a restricted space were protected by a massive brass combination lock, attached to the warped and discolored plywood door by screws Ras could have pulled out of the waterlogged wood by hand.

The ridge they took approached from the southwest. It had required a series of steps cut directly into the hard, black volcanic stone, which descended over eight hundred feet down a near-vertical gorge, in order for the people to get in and out. This incredible undertaking had been accomplished by the desperate but determined rebels in a matter of months, with nothing more than their backs and hand tools. They were used to hard work; only now it was no slave driver’s whip but the smell of freedom that drove them on. Ras understood completely; as an American patriot nothing spoke to him more eloquently than the natural human longing for independence.


Jaco Steps from above	Climbing Jaco Steps

The sharp ridges allowed for only a single line of attackers at any one time and were guarded day and night. Any time the slavecatchers tried to navigate one of the ridges, the defenders hid behind the trees and slaughtered them, stepping out of nowhere and stabbing them with spears, hacking them with cutlasses, and throwing them, screaming, down the mountain. Kent was quite the tour guide, describing this with a thousand-watt smile only truly black-skinned people were capable of exhibiting. Ras observed all this with a sense of wonder only a relatively clueless white American could bring to the table. This wonder was a good thing for Olay, as well as Ras’ relations with Kirk and Rita, because it was all that kept Ras from beating the living daylights out of Olay. Ras had asked if the hike to Jaco Steps was much of a climb. And the lying punk had told him no. “All flat, no climbing,” he’d said, grinning, sweeping his hand out as if smoothing sheets. The first slope had turned out to be nearly a mile at a forty-five-degree incline. The puffing American glared at Olay as if contemplating murder. The islanders skipped up these slopes like tourists strolling down a level beach in Florida. Their reward for this first leg of their journey was to view the house of the man who had introduced Rastafarianism to the island. Some guy named Mal. He was in jail now, doing seven years for cultivating marijuana, mainly, Kirk said, because he had pissed off the police with his blatant handling of the trade. Probably hadn’t paid them enough. The nice little bamboo cottage was festooned with flowers and cards, like some kind of memorial. The Rastas who had followed in Mal’s footsteps were a bit more subdued, more cautious. Ras knew they were also more dangerous.

Mal’s house was a classic Dominica “country house,” made with a waist-high masonry wall topped with bamboo tied together with the kind of rock-hard two-by-two stringers and pliable wicker weaving that had survived hurricanes on this island for centuries. The bamboo had been stood up in the voids of the concrete blocks that formed the bottom of the wall while concrete was poured into the voids. The bamboo’s interior had been drilled out at the bottom, so the concrete would fill it too. The top of the bamboo stalks were left with their internal separations intact, since the hollow cavities bestowed upon bamboo by nature were designed to flex and bend, to prevent the stalks from being broken by the wind. Of all the trees on the island and the benefits derived therefrom, bamboo was the most useful. After a few moments of reverential silence, Kent led them past the house of the First Rasta and into the heavy jungle.

They crossed a round, humpy hill on a walkway made of fouche trunks cut in sections and laid out corduroy style. Gigantic banyans, ficus, and water-gum trees swayed like Titans, so far above the heads of mere mortals that surely, one felt, the members of the touring party passed by completely unnoticed. The giant trees were no more concerned with humans than the birds and iguanas that perched among their Gargantuan limbs. Massive bromeliads hung precariously from huge branches blanketed with moss. Just off the path and hanging from overhead, flowers and vines jostled each other in anxious profusion, as if starved for attention.

“D’Leau Gommier”, or water-gum trees

The way dropped down to a damned difficult and rocky river crossing where Ras’ supposedly waterproof boots got soaked. From there they rose through a field of grass ten feet high and so thick it was like a solid wall on either side of the rocky track. Ginger stalks waved on either verge in the light breeze, waxy green slaves offering fabulous, fragrant red and white flowers to tempt the noses of noble personages passing by. The walkway here was no more than five feet across. Then they hit the real climb.

Another small river let them cross easily to a path that zig-zagged up a steep jungled face, with no fouche base and only the vaguest indication of a clear way to go. Rocks and roots competed with mud and running rivulets to turn the unwary ankle. Trees and vines now became steps and handholds. They were climbing nearly straight up. It was not the last time Ras would think that, if the forest weren’t there, they would all be terrified at how high and precariously perched they were. It was clear that if you fell, it wouldn’t be five feet before you fetched up against a tree trunk or boulder, however painful the short trip might be.

The climb to reach Jaco Steps

Jaco Steps would have been an incredible feat of engineering for, say, early twentieth-century contractors, with dynamite, steam engines, and a host of other tools. For nineteenth-century rebel slaves on the roof of the Caribbean with nothing but what they could hump up these ass-busting mountains, the Steps were nothing less than astonishing. From the crest of the razor-thin ridge down to the river far below, the way was a twisting corridor cut into the solid stone about four feet across and often up to six feet deep. The actual steps were irregular, with landings as narrow in places as six inches or as wide as three feet. The risers, the vertical parts, were two to three feet tall. Kent and Olay cut walking sticks for the Americans from the surrounding underbrush with a few expert strokes of their cutlasses. It was said jokingly that the Dominican male was born with a tiny cutlass in his hand.

On the way down the gorge the river plunged over rainbowed waterfalls, misting the air with a pleasant, cooling spray. Vines waved over shimmering watery space, glistening with moisture. Blooms of every tint and description battled for the eye, a veritable warfare of beauty. Once they reached the bottom of the valley, where the rebels had hidden from their Portuguese oppressors, the little party stopped for a rest and a good long smoke. Several monster joints went down. Kent spoke with Olay in Kwéyòl patois, then waded out into the river. “He will find you snails,” Olay said, rubbing his stomach. “Good to eat.” Rita made a face but Ras said he was up for some escargot. Olay grinned; the American actually had a word of French! Hell, Ras said, he ate raw oysters, sushi, frog legs, and rattlesnake. He’d eaten ’gator, and he didn’t say, but to tell the truth, it wasn’t all that good. The Seminole Indians in Florida had fed it to their dogs. “Speaking of Indians,” Ras said out of the blue – throwing a bit of their old cosmic humor down on his buddy Kirk, who had told him there was a story about the local Indians in the slave revolt as well — “what was it you were going to tell me about them?”

“Oh, yeeeah,” Kirk said, drawing it out hippie-style. “The Indians. These Indians were the Caribs, who, lest we forget, were about the only native tribe here when Columbus arrived, having conquered and no shit eaten most of the other tribes who lived here before they came. They were cannibals and not just a little either. Fuck a bunch of goats and shit, they lived on other human beings.” Kirk was clearly fascinated with the carnal Caribs. “So, for whatever reason, the Caribs didn’t follow Jaco and the other blacks into the interior, and who knows, the blacks might not have wanted them anyway. I don’t blame them. The plantation owners might have done away with the Caribs’ nasty habits for a while, but who knew what late-night they might want a taste of dark meat? The Caribs went up into their homelands in St. David’s Parrish, southeast of the Marigot Road, the road through the national reserve to the airport. Their lands run from Winblew Crossing in the north, through Bois Diable Plantation, then down to Perdue Temps.”

Ras was amazed at the horrible names of many places on the island. The Valley of Devastation surrounded the poisonous Boiling Lake. Morne Diablotins was the “mountain of the she-devils.” Bois Diable was Devils Forest. Ville Casse, “the houses thrown down,” was named for another slave revolt, where the rebels’ homes had been destroyed in retaliation. For that matter, the traffic circle that had baffled Ras on his arrival was Pont Casse, “the bridge is down,” although there was no bridge there now that he had seen. Soufriere was “the whipping place.” Southeast of the Marigot Road was an area named Perdue Temps, “trying times.” Massacre, pronounced massock, was the name of a whole town. One wondered where the current residents of some of these places had come from; those here in those “trying times” must surely have all been killed.

And of course, for pure entertainment value, there was always Fond Zomb. On your tour, folks, be sure you don’t miss Zombie Flats! See genuine Voodoo Hell, enjoy a tropical rum drink at Spanny’s famous Waterfalls Bar and Grill, and back to the ship for dinner by six! Well, he thought, it was no worse than Florida. Just north of Flagler Beach was Matanzas Inlet. Matanzas meant massacre in Spanish, because in 1565 Pedro Menendez had wiped out two hundred and forty-five Frenchmen in two separate massacres, supposedly because they had built a fort on Spanish soil, but really, because they were Protestants. The French Huguenots had refused to renounce their heresy and were murdered for it. Kirk lit another joint and took a long pull. He handed it to Ras and spoke in that peculiar, gravelly voice old potheads use when talking and trying to hold their toke at the same time.

“The Carib lands weren’t remote enough to keep out the slavers,” and he held in a cough, “and they didn’t have a defensible spot like Jaco’s people did. The Portuguese caught up with them. So, to avoid becoming slaves again, they went to the cliffs at Carib Point and jumped off. Kirk exhaled smoke, took a breath, and spoke normally. “That particular spot is now known as Carib Leap.” Ras stared at his friend, his mouth open, the joint burning away in his hand. Rita nudged him for the reefer but Ras didn’t notice. “Get the fuck out.” “No lie, man,” Kirk said, plucking the joint from his fingers and handing it over to Rita. She blew out smoke from her hit and looked him in the eye. “True dat.” She handed the joint back to him, and his head was beginning to spin. Kirk continued. “The few survivors are the ancestors of the remaining Carib tribe today, all of them right here on this island. There’s maybe three, four thousand of them, and there is no other Carib reservation or enclave anywhere else in the world.” Son of a bitch, Ras thought. An endangered species of human cannibals.

Caribs (or Kalinagos) in local dress

— 27 —

Ras woke up and for the first time in days knew where he was and did not feel like he would rather be dead. His vision was no longer double, and the light and sound from the cave entrance did not shatter his brain with agony. He was starving. He was able to stand. Darius turned from the mouth of the cavern with a smile.

“It is good to see you up, my son. Can I get you somet’ing to eat?” Ras scowled. “I could eat a horse between two mattresses.” A bit of jerk chicken, some baked banana and dasheen went down well, and raised his brutish attitude from Neanderthal to somewhere near Cro-Magnon. Homo Sapiens could wait until he’d had a drink. “Darius, my father, do you have any rum?” The little man smiled like a lion contemplating a lamb. Of course he had rum. He was, after all, the old drunk in the cave. Did he not have an image to maintain?

He’d also discovered the stash of Salbado’s killer weed, in the most novel of hiding places: under the seat of the Suzuki. A few good pulls on the bottle of cheap bush rum, a jumbo joint or two, and they both felt good as new.

It pleased Ras’ sense of irony to politely inquire of the old man for the information he might otherwise have savagely beaten out of anyone else. It didn’t hurt that he owed his life to Darius. He took that sort of thing very seriously. Besides, he trusted him. “Tell me, my father, what in the name of God are we dealing with?” Darius clasped his narrow hands and raised his eyes to the roof of the cave. A loud motorcycle buzzed hesitantly by on the highway outside. The roads were still scattered with debris from the hurricane. Darius drew hard on a new reefer, raised his head and puffed a cloud of smoke into the upper air of the cave.

“It is vampires, my son, and not your languid, polite kind from de movies. Real vampires kill and kill, and no one be able to stop eet. We find de zombs and kill dem, eet is not so hard, as you have seen. A bullet or a car will do. But zombs are not real vampires, and until we find and kill de real ones, not’ing will change.” Ras drank from the bottle again, and toked on his own spleef, which was down to the size of a regular joint in the States. He maintained a moment of silence in memory of another bottle, some quite remarkable St. John’s Island Anjeho, not quite gone, sacrificed to the zombs in what he now thought of as the Great Zombie Landslide. “So, are the ‘real vampires’ at Vena’s?” He knew it was true, even before he saw Darius nodding. It never occurred to him to retreat into denial; he knew damn well what he had seen, and it had been real enough to come as close as he cared to get to getting killed. Or worse. Kirk hadn’t been kidding. Ras wondered if he knew or if he was just repeating rumors. Ras couldn’t help thinking that “vena” in Latin meant vein, at least in medical parlance; it really meant “current” or “flow.” It was as if the world turned backward just then.

His hopelessly psychotic and drug-addled friend Kirk was not only right, he was right about one of the most outrageous claims he had ever made, and that was saying a lot. It was saying a boatload. A gigantic, high-flying, ten-engine Zeppelin chock-full of paranoid schizophrenia. The baseless, neurotic delusions of his best friend had ranged, over nearly fifty years, from ABC News to Zbigniew Brzezinski. Neither right nor left, Kirk was an equal-opportunity conspiracy theorist. And this one, awful, fatal time, he was dead on.

There were vampires at Vena’s Place. Forget that; there were vampires, at all. What else was true that he’d never wanted to acknowledge? Bush set up the 9/11 attacks on the world Trade Center. The banksters killed Kennedy for taking away the power to print money; Johnson gave it back three days after taking office. The Mob whacked Bobby Kennedy, FDR knew about Pearl Harbor, and, son of a bitch: Chem trails. Chem trails were real.

“Chemtrails”

He wanted to roar up the hill in four-wheel drive, past the prissy Belgian villa to Osama bin Laden’s house, and bang on the door. Surprise them, the way he’d surprised Albert raping the poor retarded Sofia. You know. Shout and curse, make a scene. Be a real asshole, until Osama himself came out and admitted Saddam was there. He would demand to see the Butcher of Baghdad. He would shake that murderer’s hand and tell him how healthy the evening airs were in Dominica, the Jungle Paradise. Encourage him to go walking alone at night. Suggest he go for dinner at Vena’s Place. It was, he would say, a Good Place to Sleep, Eat, and Drink.

It only occurred to him that evening what Marfa had said about being afraid. She hadn’t said they were afraid back then, in the seventies, when Attley was stalked by death. Georgia was only thirteen when the murders happened there, twenty-five years ago. “We already so frightened, we can’t be no more…” She was talking about now.

Darius, as he often did, had gone into town searching for zombies. They tended to come out at night and hang around the ragged beach shacks that passed for bars, wearing their sunglasses and staying in the shadows. Sometimes, he said, he and his companions – oh no, Darius was not alone – could catch them, before they became utterly incoherent, and give them antibiotics, but mostly they refused. The infection, he explained, affected their brains, and often they turned suspicious and violent. Because their strength outmatched their bodies’ ability to sustain it, they were extremely dangerous, in their ability not only to kill, but also to spread the disease. These zombies they killed, when they could do it without getting caught.

That afternoon Ras had pressed Darius about how he had come to be what could only be called “King of the zombie hunters.” Now he felt bad about doing it. The little man had been unwilling to talk about it, but he finally rubbed his face with both hands, as if the subject made him tired, and tipped up the rum bottle for the first time that day. Ras had discovered just how much this awful knowledge caused one to drink and smoke dope; it seemed to help.

“I was a preacher in Antigua, and I come here on a mission wit’ my family and a church group. I was a man of God. I was s’posed to tell my flock not to drink de rum and run around wit’ loose women, but it seem, somebody forget to tell me.” He looked out from the cave at the highway, and the sea. “I was down to Roseau, doin’ just dat, drinkin’ and runnin’ around wit’ a woman, when de zombs come. Dey kill many of the group at our cabins in de woods, at a place called Rav S’abricots. Dey kill,” and he took a deep, shuddering breath, “dey kill my wife, Therese, and my little son Isaac. Maybe twenty peoples die. I should have been dere. I should have save dem, or die tryin’, but no. I got to have my rum an’ my reefer and my whores. I t’ought I was so smart.” Having lost his own family under similar guilt-ridden circumstances, Ras understood how Darius felt, but hadn’t thought it was a good time to say so.

“So den I become a man on a real mission. I hunts dem, even kill dem, and I wonder. How it be, twenty, t’irty murders don’t make de television, de radio? Why de policemans no come, de politicians no make de speeches? I kill de zombs, dey look like people been dead a week or more, and nobody even look for me. I leave dem on de beach, go back de nex’ day, dey be gone, like not’ing happen. Nobody, dey don’t say shit.” He took a long pull from the bush rum. He looked hard at the bottle, which had a faded store brand from Guadeloupe, decided it was still too full, and sucked down another. Thus fortified, he continued his tale.

“I begin to meet some people who know what goin’ on, an we get togedder and kill de zombs, and I tell dem. Why nobody come askin’ de questions? Zombs just peoples not so long ago, why we ain’t hangin’ from de calabash tree? An’ dey all say de same t’ing: dey don’ want to know. You see, de superstition an’ fear so strong, de peoples don’ want to know. What de policemens go to Rav S’abricots gone say when dey get back? ‘Zombs kill twenty peoples, we investigatin’? We ’spect to arrest de zombs responsible soon?’ Dey put dem in de Bedlam for sure.” Ras recognized the word from all his historical novels: it was the English term for a mental ward. “Dey say a landslide fall on dem, tear dem up real bad, you know. What de doctor gone say about de zombs we leave dead? He don’ know, I tol’ you, and he don’ want to know, and besides, he from de islands too. He just as scared as everybody else. He say, dis one, he drown, de water make him look like dat. Dat one, she die from de AIDS. Look like de crabs get dis one here.” Ras tried to imagine so many murders covered up or ignored in the States and couldn’t. He admitted he still had a lot of arrogant mind-baggage about third-world countries and the “peoples” there. He tried to understand.

“You mean something like voodoo?” Darius turned on him sharply and for the first time seemed truly angry with him. “Fuckin’ Americans! T’ink you know ever’t’ing! Vodure a religion, my son, wit’ gods an’ demons an’ angels an’ spirits, just like de bible. Much of it come from de bible! De difference is dey believe. I give dat respect. You tell me, you truly believe you gone burn for all eternity, you fuck up,” and here he jabbed a hard finger into Ras’ chest with every word, “you ain’t gone fuck up. Not ever. So what we do? We fuck up every day. Most us Christians don’ believe shit.”

— 28 —

Ras could hear the rocks on the beach rolling in the light surf. Clack clack clack, pause, clack clack clack. Clack clack up, clack clack back down, like giant billiard balls. The cave felt to him as if he had been born there. He washed in the little waterfall maybe ten times a day. He was growing stronger. It was a good thing, too, because some serious action was going down. There was a minor arsenal in the rear of the cave, which had been brought in a few guns or boxes of ammunition at a time by Darius’ partners in crime, usually late at night. Nighttime in Dominica was black as a coal mine unless there was a moon, and street lights were practically non-existent.

Five FHN AR-15s stood with two Ruger Mini-14s against the curved back wall, well-greased and ready to go, along with enough ammo to take over Cuba. Seven Czechoslovakian SKS’s, semi-automatic AK-74 knock-offs with flash suppressors and folding stocks, lay in a crate, packed in hay, but with only three cases of Russian reloads; used brass, he knew from experience, might fail to fire easily one out of fifteen or twenty rounds. Darius had said the Americans were far more reliable in supplying ammunition than the former Communists. That, Ras thought wryly, had to be proof that God hated Communists. That was why He had created capitalism, to supply bullets for those who would kill Commies for Him. Ras was proud to be an unreconstructed Commie-hater. Had there been a KKK for Commie-haters, he would have been the Grand Dragon.

Darius entered the cave from the north, back from checking on the Suzuki, while Ras sat under the waterfall. He had parked it about a mile up the highway, in a forest parking area just this side of the port construction zone. Left alone, it would have been stripped in no time. Darius moved it about the site every few days, to make it look like it belonged to one of the engineers from some other island; no local would be able to afford a rental car. He said he had placed a rag on the dash in the colors of Jamaica, universal to Rastafarians: red, green, yellow and black. It wasn’t magic but might discourage the local thieves from pillaging the car. It wasn’t brotherhood either; when it came to business and cars, the Rastas were known as brutal enforcers, and often a construction or other commonplace job was a cover for their gangster operations, the usual: dope, gambling, and whores. Darius said he’d had to drag Ras to the cave the night he was attacked by the zombs because for the car to be seen stopping there, even that one time, could have led to disaster. Ras couldn’t imagine how the little shit had done it. Even after dropping thirty pounds during his recovery, Ras still figured he ran about two hundred, give or take. Darius could not possibly weigh in at over one-forty if he was soaking wet, and in Dominica he often was.

“You gonna sit in dat water forever? I feel like I got anodder natural son good for not’ing but sittin’ in de rain.” Ras glared at him with one eye, the other plastered over by his long, thick brown hair, which streamed down his shoulders with the splattering of the tiny cascade. He had fallen into the local accented English, and asked, “We gone go kill us some zombs, my father? I be getting’ bored sittin’ here like a natural son.” Darius patted him on the arm as the pure, cool waters of the island poured over his body, and nodded solemnly, “Yes indeed, my son. Most certainly,” and winked.

As Ras dried himself with the sparse rags they used – getting dry was not a priority, and usually didn’t last long anyway – he asked questions, and Darius continued his education. “Why now? Other than I’m up to it?” Darius measured him with narrow eyes. It seemed to Ras he had passed some test for which he had not studied. “You know how de trees must be cut at de right time, in order dey do not rot. So all t’ings must be done according to de season, ‘a time to every purpose,’ as de Good Book say. Now is de dark of de moon. Zombs cannot see well in de dark, and electric lamps blind dem. We have never been able to get inside Vena’s Place since we find out dey are dere, and kill de real vampires. Dark moon let us get dere, but no one be crazy enough to go in till de sun is up. We now have de men, and de guns, and we will need stakes, too.” It was too much. Ras shook his head. “You really use stakes? Through the heart?” Darius looked at the American like the reluctant caretaker of a simple-minded child.

“We are dealing wit’ a bacterial blood infection here. Dis infection be centered in de heart. In a real vampire, de heart controls all, de bacteria have taken it over. De brain is dead, as is de rest of de body. De wooden stake kills de bacteria, but it takes a long time.”

“So what’s the difference between a zomb and a real vampire?” Darius eyes reflected the waterfall as the sun dropped into the Caribbean Sea. “Oh, my son, it be all de difference in de world. A zomb a human being infected wit’ de vampire bacteria, and wit’ proper treatment, antibiotics, might be saved. A real vampire a corpse, animated by de infected heart, malevolent beyond description. Immensely powerful, and t’irsty for blood, and not just blood but flesh. Dey truly eat de peoples dey kill.” Ras pulled on a pair of mostly clean shorts. Darius had dropped his one plastic banana bag with most of his clothes on the highway one of the times he had gone to move the car, and when he returned they were gone, stolen by the dirt-poor locals. The waterfall had served as a laundry of sorts, which beat the hell out of nothing but not by much. He was going to have to get more clothes soon, somehow. “Okay, then what is it makes a zomb turn into a real vampire?” You had to be very literal when questioning an islander. They would never presume to put words in your mouth, which might have been polite but was a pain in the ass when trying to get an explanation. Darius’ dark eyes lit up.

“Ah, dey must die of it! You see, many peoples get infected wit’ de bacteria. Anyone who survive a vampire attack, like in your stupid movies, dey have it, but forget dat. Hardly nobody survive such an attack. But once a true vampire emerge, even dey shit or piss pass it on. Peoples get it from de water, dey pass it on t’rough sex, needles, and in de water too. Mos’ peoples, dey become infected, dey need blood to survive, but dey don’t know what to do. Dey know dey be sick, but don’t know what wrong. De government clinic, dey don’t know. T’ink maybe dey got de AIDS. Dey go de Vodure doctor, but he don’t know. If he know, he buy de plane ticket and go Miami tomorrow.” He drew half a joint from his shirt pocket, a mere four inches long, and lit it with a paper match. He took a mouthful, then let smoke out his mouth and sucked it up his nostrils. “You friend, he grow de goods for sure.” He turned serious again.

“Most die because dey weak, dey need to eat blood but dey don’t know dat. It save us de trouble. Ones who survive, soon de blood of de real vampire call to dem. De one who make dem, he have a power over dem, even from far away. Dey go to him and become his slaves. He tell dem what to do. Now dey know to go after animals and humans for what dey need. And many peoples survive dis kind of attack, by de zombs. Because, as you have seen, de zomb, he is vulnerable. He strong, too strong for his own good, but he die as easy as anybody, maybe easier. Wit’out blood, dey fall apart. But a few, dey find de blood dey need and some live for maybe twenty years. And den, if dey die from de infection and not’ing else, dey become a real vampire. De only way to kill a real vampire is wit’ a stake into de heart, but it also take dem many years, maybe anodder twenty, for it to kill dem for real, and de stake must remain in de body all dat time. If de stake not cut from de right tree at de right moon, den de fungus and rot and de insect come and eat it all up. If at any time before de vampire truly dead de stake be removed or destroyed, pretty soon he wake up. And in no time he just as bad as new.” Darius gave a deep chuckle about his little joke.

“Do they really suck blood through their fangs? And can they fly and change shapes, like into a bat or something?” The little brown man looked at Ras like an indulgent grandfather but did not seem so irritated with him as before. “No, my son, not like dat. Dey got lots of long sharp teeth all right, and dey bite you and suck up de blood, but not wit’ fangs, like some rattlesnake in reverse. It not’ing so pretty as dat, more like dey a meat grinder, rip you to pieces and eat you up. And yes, dey change as dey grow, but not into bats or wolves. Dey get bigger, stronger. Massive chest, long limbs, heavy muscles give dem inhuman streng’t, like de zombs, but dey bodies can wit’stand it. Dey can’t fly but dey could jump twenty feet in de air, or smash a man down wit’ one fist.”

Ras only had one more question. “Who is ‘us’? As in ‘we’ kill them? I know there are other vampire hunters, but I haven’t seen any of them, only the guns piling up in the cave.” Darius grinned. “Yes, my son, dey would like to know about you too. Well, you will meet some of dem tonight. A few are jealous of you already. Dey t’inking dey should be de next king.” Ras wondered exactly what that was supposed to mean. “Why shouldn’t they?” Darius regarded him curiously. “Because, my son, you are de next king. Georgia has prophesied it, and so it will be.” Ras started to say he didn’t want to be king of anything, but Darius just shrugged him off. He handed Ras three of the ARs and a Mini-14 and turned a thumb towards the highway. “Your car is just upso, to de right. I will meet you dere presently. If any cars go by, get into de ditch and hide.” Ras considered disdaining this command but realized the sight of a heavily armed white man with a battered face would surely excite comment. He slung the rifles on his shoulders and hefted two cases of pre-loaded magazines under either arm. He peered up and down the coast for a second and, sighting no traffic, turned to the north and set off at a hard trot.

Only two cars came by as he made his way toward the port. Trees which had fallen in the storm lay along the road, and piles of cut wood were stacked all along the highway. Any time trees went down armies of locals showed up as if by magic, sporting chain saws and axes. Many folks still used wood to cook, and it would never go to waste. Water still poured down the mountain and pounded through the concrete ditch, but he couldn’t tell if it was more than was usual.

He found the Suzuki where Darius had said he would, and they keys were under the front wheel, hidden in the weeds. He slung the rifles and ammunition into the back. The rain had got in through the shattered back windows and a thick white mold had begun to devour the rear carpet. Before sitting down in the driver’s seat, he checked to make sure the zombie’s arm was gone. It was. Thank you, Darius my father, he thought. The limb surely would have been awful by now.

By the time Darius reached the car, Ras had the engine running and warmed up. Darius unloaded another AR, two of the SKS’s and three canvas ammunition sacks through the left rear door, then got in the front. It felt good to Ras to be driving again. They wound their way upso, past the garbage dump in Roger, where the dumpster said, “No Animals. No Babies.” They passed the truck that had somehow crashed into the tree going up the hill. The tree had fallen onto it during the hurricane, finally crushing the vehicle which had tormented it for so long, in a kind of slow-motion revenge.

— 29 —

On the long, slow trip up to Vena’s Place, Ras once more pressed his new friend about the nature of their enemy. “So, what about the story they can’t come out in daylight? That the sun will kill them? Is that true? And that crap about mirrors? No way you can’t see somebody in a mirror, dead or not.” Darius was silent for a while, but Ras had learned not to push the little island man, and none of Ras’ little interrogation tricks seemed to work on him. He would talk when he was ready, and not before. When they reached Pont Casse and the roundabout, Darius spoke from the absolute darkness of the seat beside the American.

“Dey don’t like sunlight because it burn de dying zomb skin, it hurt de eyes. It don’t kill dem, only burn, like de white tourist on de beach all day. Only it burn real deep, it hurt real bad, de skin peel off an’ look like someone dead already. Here, where all de peoples black, it look even worse. Oh-ho yes, you see dem in de mirror jus’ fine. Problem is, so can dey. An dey don’t like what dey see one little bit. Skin peelin’ off, hair fallin’ out, fingernails black, eyes goin’ whiter every day. So dey break or do away wit’ any mirrors around. Family ask what de matter is, dey say not’ing. Afraid dey got de AIDS or somet’ing. Chances good, dey got de vampire infection same way as you get de AIDS, from drugs or sex, and don’t want tell nobody what happen.”

Ras remembered Uncle Charlie’s letters. He was drinking himself into an early grave, he’d told himself. Charlie was getting old. Of course his hair was falling out. Hadn’t he mentioned something about contracting some awful skin condition? “What is it about the stakes?”

Darius took his time answering. “You need de stakes alright. Dey kill de bacteria in de heart of a real vampire.” Ras remembered something from his studies in college. In the 1960s, the American Plastics Institute had done a study trying to show their products were superior to wood for things like cutting boards and tabletops. But the research had proven beyond a doubt that bacteria of all kinds flourished on plastic surfaces, but wood killed most or all of the bacteria associated with meat and poultry. It all made so much sense it made his skin crawl. He snorted a laugh, because his dad would have said, “If your skin crawls, what does it smell like when your asshole gets around to where your nose is supposed to be?” He could feel the little brown man looking at him strangely in the darkness. Well, fuck the little brown man if he didn’t like it. He was, after all, bringing Ras’ own still half-skeptical American ass along with him to go kill vampires. Any minor weirdness on the part of the white tourist hijacked into being a vampire hunter should be forgiven, he thought wryly, considering the insane reality of vampires in the Island Paradise.

Long before they got to the landslide downso from Vena’s, Darius motioned him across to the right side of the road and told him to park under a spreading calabash tree. It was an area set aside for downhill drivers to get off the road to allow others on the narrow way to pass. Ras slid the little truck hard against the cliffside, scraping the already battered little Suzuki. Darius seemed to approve without the slightest motion or word. They got out the driver’s side, pulled their weapons from the rear of the vehicle, and strapped on the heavy bags and cases of ammunition. The stout American, loaded with iron, pulled some branches over and started covering the car. Darius watched for a heartbeat, and then, approving again, grabbed some palm fronds from the concrete ditch. In no time the car was covered well enough to escape detection until sunrise at least. They jumped the ditch and proceeded to climb the hillside.

The last time Ras had climbed mountains like this had been last week, at Jaco Steps. He was still stiff from that excursion. The time before that had been in Vietnam in 1972, thirty-two years earlier. On the trip to Jaco Steps it had been daylight, it had not rained, and he had not been carrying sixty-odd pounds of hardware. Oh, yes, and he had not had a concussion and spent days in a cave on his ass, losing muscle mass faster than you could say shit. His face had not been smashed in, and he had not at that time lost five teeth. Then again, back in the day he had spent months getting well after being shot, twice God damn it, losing muscle mass and so on, and had gone back to the war anyway. Of course, back then he had not spent ten years snorting enough cocaine to sink a battleship (or being in a marriage and in business) and only been back at the gym for a year or two. He had just about decided it was good to be back in the saddle, iron and all, when the nightly rains began to fall.

Darius soon disappeared into the vines and trees above him, moving from root to branch in the heart of the deluge like some modern, heavily-armed forest primate. How did the little son of a bitch do it? When Ras peered into the streaming darkness looking for him, the downpour hammered into his eyes and he was blinded. He struggled against streams of water that had not existed moments before. Pulling on a thick vine, Ras was able to make a bit of progress and finally came to a relatively level hilltop. Darius stood upright in the slashing torrent as if nothing could be more natural. In fact, nothing was. “You took your time, my son,” Darius shouted into the storm. Ras snorted. “I was admiring some flowers along the way.”

They made their way over several more hills in solid jungle, much of the way more or less vertical. On the tops of the hills the hurricane had left swaths of scattered, broken trees behind, and they had to clamber clumsily over them. Ras was becoming seriously winded, not only from the exertion, but also from the elevation. The area around Vena’s was about thirteen hundred feet above sea level, and Ras didn’t like to admit it but he could feel the sparseness of the air. The rain stopped as quickly as it had begun. They came out into the top of a valley that was utterly black below them, feeling their way around tree trunks and following a plunging river by the sound. They kept it on their right as they slogged through a field of dasheen, just now standing up after having been flattened by the hurricane. The triangular leaves dumped more water into their path, and the mud sucked at their feet. Frogs chirped, bats squeaked. Meeting-lizards clattered their little drink glasses, seeking mates in the night. Ras realized he was barefoot. When exactly had he forgotten to wear shoes? It was a revelation. He had gone from having the best footwear on the island to having none.

Somewhere in the hellish sea of invisibility a tiny spark appeared. At first Ras thought it was a clack-clack. Soon it resolved into a shaded flashlight being waved sparingly in their direction. Ras could appreciate the need for signal security on a night operation. They met up with what Darius told him was a group of eleven men. He was introduced to only two. Anibal Maraque was a mixed African and Greek, and the very image of a short, swarthy pirate. Oily black curls swayed over his massive shoulders as he shook Ras’ hand. He sported a real Russian AK-47 and two bags of extra magazines. Like the bandoliers of old, the web straps of the bags criss-crossed his hairy chest, wrinkling a pretentious black leather vest. From the rings on this vest hung four US Army-issue hand grenades Ras recognized as Mark 4s. Anibal was said, Ras learned later, to be the “natural” son of the elder Estaphan, born on the wrong side of the sheets to a black island woman who ran one of the old man’s stores.

The other man Ras was introduced to was Mattias Goodwill, an NBA recruiter’s dream, at least six feet-seven inches, with dreadlocks to his waist and wearing a black Orlando Magic tank top, long baggy shorts, and no more shoes than Ras himself. He carried a Mini-14 like it was a water pistol, and an oversized cutlass hung from his belt. The towering black man leaned down from the grey clouds above to look Ras over, his streaming dreads falling forward about his long African face. He seemed to approve what he saw. Without speaking he extended his bony fist for a knuckle-bump. Ras returned it, and, also without speaking, thumped his chest for respect as well. The massive face turned in surprise, then broke into a grin so bright it could have given away their position from a mile away. The huge man glanced sideways at Darius, nodding in pleasure, and thumped his own chest. Mattias too had never been offered respect from a white man. He was impressed.

Maraque gave a low whistle and the party formed into a ragged line in the muddy darkness. Those Ras could see were mostly the usual skinny black island men. One wore his dreads in the baggy wool cap of red, yellow, and green – the colors of Jamaica – that had also come to signify Rastafarian, anywhere. A little yellow dude with sunken eyes looked familiar to Ras. Some of the men carried heavy electric lanterns. Darius relieved Ras of some of the rifles and ammunition, distributing them among the less well-armed. It was a surprising relief to un-ass the weight; Ras thought again how he wasn’t a hard-assed grunt in his twenties anymore. One of the ammo sacks Darius carried actually contained hardwood stakes, no doubt cut on the right night of the right moon. When the stakes were passed around, Ras took one without comment and put it with the rest of his ammunition.

They moved off into the night, the men not needing to be told what to do. It felt like the old days. He was back to his combat weight, even if it had taken a concussion and starvation to get him there, but nothing could relieve the weight of forty years of soft living and snorting cocaine. The rains had subsided, and Ras could see the trail they were taking. It made him nervous that they had no flank patrols and no one watching their backtrail, but Darius explained that they were not in a hostile war environment like Vietnam. They were stalking vampires in an isolated location. There was no reason to expect an ambush or attack until they tried to break into Vena’s.

Ras was still nervous. The time to expect an attack was when an attack was not expected. He dropped back to keep an eye behind them. They covered another mountain ridge and he intentionally lagged at the rear, staring into the depths of blackness. Someone came back along the trail, making enough noise to alert the Alaskan National Fucking Guard all the way from here in the East Caribbean. Maraque thumped him on the shoulder and almost got a rifle butt in the face for his trouble. Ras whirled on the Greek in a rage and grabbed him by the throat, squeezing hard. The pirate choked, his eyes bulging. Anibal Maraque had not uttered a word, yet the psycho American quietly ordered him: “Shut. The fuck. Up.” Anibal shut up.

Anibal saw the madman’s eyes flash back the way they had come, and his blood stopped in his veins. The American whispered in his ear like a lover. “Cock that chopper.” Without hesitation, Anibal pulled the slide on his prized Russian rifle to chamber a round. The action was well-oiled and nearly silent. Still, his hands shook; it seemed as though the tiny clicks should have been heard across the island. His teeth chattered in the humid night. Death was coming. He felt nauseated. He hadn’t sensed it; the American had. He sent a low whistling call up the trail and soon the others arrived, led by Mattias Goodwill, who didn’t speak, only turned his head questioningly. Anibal Maraque pointed back the way they had come, then crossed himself. He whispered something to Mattias. “Aglo Theo, holy God, brother, they are behind us!” The giant black man’s nod was just an impression of movement in the awful dark, but still Ras could sense fear in it.

Ras was gratified at the speed with which they reacted. Spreading out to the flanks, the crew of misfits sank down in the dasheen and disappeared. Ras and Mattias lay in the ditch on the left side of the path while Anibal stretched out on the other. Ras noticed that the Greek aimed his AK left handed. At that moment the zombs came, rushing through the dasheen. Their legs slapped the wide leaves, making a sound like the rains were coming. Ras was ready to fire when Anibal cut loose with the AK on full automatic. The high-pitched whistling of the Russian assault rifle rang across the night, the muzzle flashes revealing dozens of white-eyed monsters closing on them at a sprint. Three fell back immediately, hit by Anibal’s fire, and the rest of the zombie hunters cut loose.

AKs and Mini-14s sent streaks of fire into a battalion of zombs that had been following their backtrail. The ragged black militia of freaks fell like chopped sugar cane. Ras had chosen an AR, a semi-automatic which he knew was more accurate than full-auto weapons, because you could choose your target and get them with one shot. He nailed one after another while his companions blazed away, wasting ammunition but killing dozens of the bastards nonetheless. The zombies didn’t even try to hide or run. The heavy lights struck spears of brilliance into the night, blinding the zombies as they came. They ran at the line of gunmen, charged them, jumped into them. They clawed at their guns and bit at their faces. When shot multiple times they lay on the ground and convulsed, screeching, their awful long teeth sticking out unnaturally and dripping slime.

Ras popped rapid single-fire shots around him from the AR, feeling back in the groove. These fuckers weren’t nearly as tough as the Cong, who made you pay dearly for killing them, even if they did have the courtesy to stay dead. A screaming demon leaped onto his back, and he spun madly, trying to dislodge it. Claws ripped into his neck, teeth snapped at his ear. He turned his rifle upside down and fired over his own shoulder, but somehow the fiend avoided his shots.

The next instant the zomb was snatched from Ras and he turned to see Mattias holding the snarling ball of once-human flesh at arm’s length as it raked at his hand and wrist. The cutlass flashed, shring, thump, splat, and a tattered black head went rolling. The rest of the body dropped to the ground with a greasy crunch but continued to shake and writhe for more than a minute. It seemed there were no more zombies. Anibal came and stood close to Ras, both of them breathing in deep gasps, as if they had run a four-hundred-yard dash.

“You saved our asses, man,” Anibal said. “What the fuck was that? They never done that before!” Mattias turned to them, his face dim even in the light of the lanterns. “It is true, my friend. Dey have never shown any evidence of planning in the past, no kind of cunning at all.” It was the first time the giant had spoken in Ras’ presence. For his size, the black man’s voice was ridiculously high and girlish. Darius spoke from the darkness in his light baritone. “I told you he would be good.” They all seemed to nod into the black night; it was hard to tell, but Ras knew he had proven himself, to men who, for all their lack of experience, had proven themselves. They hadn’t broken, hadn’t run. Half the guys Ras knew from in-country would have lit out for the hills faced with an enemy like that. Darius turned to the others. “Remember, if you have even a scratch, you must take de pills.” He passed out antibiotic capsules from a ziplock bag. Ras took two and dry-swallowed them down. Without another word, Mattias turned and led them out across Zombie Flats.

— 30 —

Vena’s Place was a shadow on a hill against a moonless sky. The squad had turned their powerful flashlights off well before they could have been seen from the hotel. The back of the roof was obviously caved in, and many of the towering Royal palms in the courtyard were thrown down. The rain had stopped again, and by starlight alone Ras could find the path. At the bottom of the hill they encountered dozens of battered vehicles, mostly rental cars and vans, strewn about the jungle floor. They had clearly been sent rolling down the mountain. A few literally hung in the trees. Ras heard a ringing in his ears, and he had to put his head down and breathe deeply to avoid throwing up. The vampires ate the tourists, Kirk had told him, and threw their cars down the hill. Kirk knew more than Ras’ best friend ought to know. It was all real, but somehow until now, even with the screeching assault by supernatural biological robots just an hour before, he had somehow not really believed it. He searched out Darius in the pre-dawn gloom.

“You said if it is detected early, infected people can be cured?” Darius nodded. “Quiet, my son, dey don’t see so good but dey can hear very well. It is true, if dey treated wit’ de antibiotics, but it must be de right kind, and very strong, very high doses, and dey may be saved.” Ras agonized over whether Kirk and Rita might have been infected, and if so, could they be saved? He shivered at the sound of those words. He had heard them so often in religious terms, and they brought back shadows from his youth.

If he had understood Rita correctly, the blond leaner whose literary career involved channeling aliens had said their home world revolved around the sun exactly opposite the Earth, and so was undetectable. It was upside down, and rotated the other way, even though such orientations were known to be meaningless to anyone with a passing acquaintance with astrophysics. Ignoring the fact that scientists could now detect a satellite even in another star system by distortions in the gravitational fields, and had detected no such planet, and despite the odd resemblance to the alleged “home world” of one of his favorite childhood comic-book super-heroes, Ras now felt he was on that planet at this very moment. He could no longer be sure that anything he believed was truly…well, true.

He had spent his life calling bullshit on most of the ridiculous notions people had tried to foist upon him. Now, he was not even positive that shit ran downhill, as his dad had always told him. Did a cat have an ass? Was a bullfrog’s ass watertight? Did wild bears shit in the woods? Was the Pope Catholic? He was back in the jungle, like in his worst nightmares ever. Or ever had been, until his family was erased in a ball of fire and cocaine, and his previously worst nightmares had become tame in comparison. Now he hunted mythical vampires amongst a magical host who numbered, he realized with a shudder, thirteen. Who was he? Jesus? Judas? Zoroaster? Loki?

The hillside leading up to the back of Vena’s Place was steep but mostly clear. Trees spread angled canopies over a slope interspersed with a few boulders and stands of tall grass. Giant bromeliads hung from the crotches of water-gum trees. The group gathered behind Darius, Mattias, and Anibal and waited, at the exact point that the mountain rose from the flats. Ras didn’t have to ask why; they were waiting for the sunrise. Not that sunlight would actually kill real vampires or even the pathetic zombies, but it would blind them and cause them pain. They would avoid it if they could. Ras thought that the hunters had expected to surprise the zombies and that was now a vain hope. Anibal kept up his questions. “What the fuck was that? You ever see that before?” He was whispering to Mattias, who shook his head. Darius looked daggers at Anibal in the dawn. Ras tapped Darius on the shoulder and motioned him to follow. They moved slowly out to the flank, around a few trees. The others stopped whispering long enough to watch them go.

“So, Darius, what the fuck was that? Thought you said there was no need for flankers, no screeners, no backtrail watchers, hey? This ain’t Viet fuckin Nam, right?” The little man patted him on the arm, and Ras would have given anyone else his arm back broken. But this man had saved him, had cleaned the shit off him so he was not shamed, and that meant a lot to a man like Ras. That debt had not yet been paid; might never be paid. “Shh, my son, careful. I was wrong. Dis mean someone smart be runnin’ dem, be tellin’ dem what to do. Somebody smart like you.”

“Shush, my ass. It means they knew we were coming. They’ll cut us down like the dumbasses we are if we don’t change the plan.” The dark little man seemed to be coughing, but the American finally realized he was laughing. Darius gently patted his own thigh with humor. “Oh please! You t’ink dey have artillery up dere? Machine guns maybe? My son! What you have seen is all dey got, until we get to de vampires. When dat happen, who knows?” Oh great, Ras thought, that was like saying all the Cong had had was more Cong. That situation had not worked out as well as planned, for sure and for Goddamned certain. He had serious doubts this would turn out any better. He did feel a little silly, though; the idea of zombies firing mortars and field guns did seem idiotic once you thought about it for a second.

“Well, whoever is running things sure seems to have some idea of military tactics, which is damned inconvenient. Wait! So you never tried to kill a real vampire?” Darius was shaking his head. “I spent many years killing zombs, trying to get to de heart, and who knows? At de heart dere may be only one real vampire, but no, I do not know for sure how it can be done.” That, of course, was the real question. They went back to the rest of what Ras now thought of as “the squad” and settled under the trees for a couple hours of one-eyed sleep.

Dawn brought a chill, and with it came a cannibal. When Ras cracked his lids and saw a tiny brown man with teeth filed to points grinning at him from inches away, he suppressed the urge to bolt up and scream. Just the fact the creature had been able to get that close was a total failure of all his training. Ras reminded himself that screaming wouldn’t save him. Only thinking would, and then only if did it fast. But he couldn’t think of anything to do. His hand tightened on his rifle. The little Carib obviously sensed his tension. “No kill, no kill,” he said, bobbing his head and grinning. He wore a loincloth, a necklace of brown seeds, and lots of tattoos. He carried a spear, a tiny bow, a cutlass, and a Mac-10. Under his arm was a quiver of little arrows. His hair was a black bowl with a knot at the back and something stuck through his nose. Was that a bone?

Darius appeared beside the Carib and Ras opened his eyes all the way. “I see you have met Chuqui. He was our eleventh man last night, keepin’ de watch out ahead.” Ras refrained from mentioning that it had been their rear that had required a watchman, and offered a knuckle bump. Chuqui just smiled with his sharp teeth. Darius said, “His culture, dey have no ritual of touching de hands. Indians stand a ways apart to negotiate, so no one play rotten.” The native chattered in a small voice to Darius, who listened like an indulgent father. “Chuqui say, time enough for sleep when you’re dead.” Ras showed his own teeth in a wide wolf-smile to the Carib, which brought unbridled delight to the little cannibal’s face. “Chuqui say you are very lucky. He say he want to follow a lucky man like you.” Ras kept his toothy grin on the Carib. “Tell him not to sneak up on me again, if he wants to stay lucky,” Ras said sourly. Darius laughed and said something to Chuqui in the Carib tongue, which he clearly knew, and they both laughed. As Ras stood and checked his weapon, Chuqui answered at length between chuckles. Darius said, “He say you may be lucky, but you sleep like a fat old dog. He say he could steal the funny wajuku you Americans wear under your skins, your underwear, and your balls wouldn’t even know it until dey were cold.” This struck Ras as so funny he roared laughter and slapped the Indian on the back. Anyone else his size would have been knocked of their feet. Chuqui didn’t even rock on his heels. It was like hitting a tree.

“So, if the Caribs jumped off Carib Leap to avoid being slaves, where did the Caribs come from who are here now?” Darius’ eyes grew wide but he still smiled at Chuqui. “Where you hear about dat? Anyway, I cannot translate dat to Chuqui, because he swear to me one time de only man he ever eat was a white man who question his family history in just dat fashion.” Ras’ eyebrows twisted up. “What fashion?” Darius scratched his head. “It is a matter of honor. His fathers did not have a chance to jump. Dey were confined, in chains and cages, at de time. Later, when de colony break down, de Caribs who remain fight for dey freedom and dey win it. Even from de blacks, who would have kept dem in chains out of fear. Dey very brave and patriotic. It is a matter of high emotion wit’ de descendants.”

— 31 —

The squad set out up the hill. Sunlight glowed in differing patterns on the slopes before them. The light green planes of banana and the bushy groves of breadfruit gave way to patches of shorter, darker dasheen. Here and there were local houses surrounded by gardens of tomatoes, carrots, and stands of brilliant emerald marijuana. Near the top, shadows played under giant water-gum trees, while on the edges of the forest, tall, stout calabashes were hung with their basketball-sized fruits. Bromeliads stood proud from every branch. On every side dangled trailing vines, whose flowers were just beginning to open to the dawn.

Ras came up onto the flat below the hotel on the right side of the line of advancing men. To his own right was Darius as his wingman, and then Chuqui, moving like a morning mist, without a sound. The other nine were to his left. Just like when he was surfing, or in Nam, he preferred the right flank. It was just the way he understood the world best.

Vena’s Place had been hit hard by the storm. They approached the rear left corner of the main building, which was shaped like three sides of a square with the open side away from them. It was three stories high, and just like Kirk had said had no windows looking out over the wide verdant valley called Fond Zomb. The wrecked cars and vans that had obviously been tumbled down the hill now lay, battered, among the heavy brush, or lodged against the boles of trees.

The building now owned a new observation deck right in the middle, consisting of the two top floors, onto which a massive D’Leau Gommier tree had fallen and smashed open the roof and walls. The tree had then slid down the mountain, dragging roots and debris along with it, and leaving several luxurious rooms half-open to the daily rains. There was something eerie about the furniture and beds sitting out in the rising daylight. “Natural open-air cabanas,” the advertisements would say, he thought wildly. “With your very own view of beautiful Zombie Flats. Incomparable nature shows when the sun goes down. A good place to Sleep, Drink, and Eat.”

Ras was thinking how oddly quiet it was, the moment before rocks began raining down on the invading party. He was looking directly at Darius when a stone the size of a coconut hammered the little islander’s head with the sound of a melon hitting pavement. Darius went down and Ras knew immediately he was dead. Or good as dead anyway, because if he lived with that fractured skull, it would make Georgia look like Miss America. His stomach dropped to his knees, but he backed up against the wall anyway, and grabbed Chuqui by the hair to stop him going after Darius. Damn all the rotten fucking luck in the world! The little Indian turned a look on him that would fry bacon, and Ras let go of the black knot as though it were a snake. He shouted, “Get against the wall! It’s only rocks!” The shocked squad rushed to the base of the hotel. One of the men, skinny, yellow and bald, with sunken eyes, sprinted from the far left towards the wall and caught a chunk of masonry a glancing blow on the shoulder. He fell but was up in a heartbeat. Damned if these hill folks weren’t athletes, every one. Ras felt he had seen the little man before, and he realized with a wondering expression that it was the cocky little high-yellow shit from the airport who’d tried to cage his bags for a tip.

Chuqui had refrained from going after Darius, but he was looking at him. Thirty feet away, the King of the Zombie Killers lay with his skull caved in and his blood pouring down the hill, soaking into the grass. Ras sucked in what could have been a sob. Oh, my father, he thought, you were wrong; they did have artillery. The first heavy projectile weapons in history were thrown stones. His head jerked around to the sound of cries from his troop. They were calling out to God, Jah, and other local powers, cursing; they seemed about to fall apart. Next, Ras knew, they would run. It was as familiar to him as his memories of Vietnam, and his training took over. He was the team leader now.

“Shut the fuck up! Those were nothing but rocks! Thank God they don’t explode; we’d all be dead!” He glared at them with his teeth bared and they shut up. He looked to his left to see Chuqui pointing his spear at them and showing his own formidable fangs. Tears that had already been waiting because of Darius sprang to his eyes. This little Indian shit had Ras’ back. The Carib turned to him, his grimace transforming into a grin of conspiracy. He ducked a rock thrown from the roof, and jumped against the wall so that Ras was between him and the others. Chuqui opened his mouth to show his sharpened teeth to the frightened trooper behind the American, Ras’ blood went icy cold. He was seeing the identical fangs, the same awful smile, as the murderous youth painted on the wall of his room at the Hummingbird Hotel.

[photo: note from Roger: “Please insert the pic of the painting here”]

The truth, he thought, was that these islanders were no strangers to cannibalism. Kirk had said the Caribs had eaten the other native peoples of the islands nearly to extinction before Columbus got here. He knew they had come as far as Florida, capturing the Ais Indians, for whom Florida’s Indian River was named, and taking them home as cattle for slaughter. And now there were no more Caribs anywhere but here in little old Dominica. Marfa had told him that, of the many animal and human victims, most were left with almost no blood. Zombs needed blood to live but didn’t know how to get it. They just ate their victims – at least in part; maybe parts would be a better term. They tore into them and sucked up the blood like wolves. But the Caribs had done much the same for centuries. Were they somehow carriers of this mysterious vampire bacteria?

“Maraque!” Ras called for Anibal. The pirate sidled along the wall, glancing fearfully upwards at the roof, whence the occasional rock still flew, endangering the unwary. He was making the sign of the cross and sweating like a hairy pig as he hugged the ragged concrete foundation. Ras smiled at him, and his dark eyes went wide. Was the American mad?

“My friend,” said Ras, “I believe it is time for your little lemons to be of use.” Anibal looked puzzled for a second, then glanced down where Ras was pointing, at Anibal’s chest, the hair curling from his zippered vest. The hand grenades hung there, forgotten in the rush up the hill. The man grinned foolishly and shook his head. “I have only these. I never wanted to waste one to try them.” Ras nodded sagely. “Only time will tell if you have chosen wisely.” He loved that line. It was from a movie about a horse race through the Arabian desert. He held out his hand, palm up. Anibal looked at him sideways but carefully unclipped one of the grenades and passed it over.

Ras rolled it in his hand to take a look. It was an MK26A2, a model he was familiar with from his all-expense-paid vacation in Southeast Asia. It had a smooth olive-drab case, with letters stenciled in yellow and a red safety handle. The MK26A2 was a fragmentation, antipersonnel, delay-detonating, impact-actuated grenade with an internal notch fragmentation coil. This metal coil provided the fragments, often no bigger than a large chunk of Number 2 pencil lead, which wreaked massive death and destruction on the receiving end. Old but reliable, it had a radius of destruction of fifteen meters, meaning anything within about fifty feet would be blown to hell. A certain-death fatality radius of five meters was combined with the ability, if not contained, to send fragments tearing into objects and people as far as seven hundred feet away.

He stepped to his left along the wall, motioning for the others to follow. They were stout lads, he had to admit. Not one stayed behind and not one high-tailed it to the boonies, and they sure as hell could have. These were, after all, their boonies. It was somehow like he was now on the side of the Cong, instead of the invaders. If it hadn’t been for Darius copping it, it would actually have been kind of cool.

When he reached the sloping edge of the breach the fallen forest giant had made in the back wall, Ras stopped short of exposing himself to the flying stones and peeked around the ruined edge. Although easily injured or killed, the zombs were incredibly strong and could obviously hurl rocks with deadly velocity. He determined that most of what he now naturally thought of as “the enemy” were on his side of the tumbled tree’s broken branches, which was good. Some kind of black mess seemed to be spilling out from the broken floors of the hotel, flowing down the walls and the trunk of the great toppled tree, and it was at this point Ras began to smell something incredibly putrid. A soft, evil buzz seemed to emanate from the area as well. He assumed the stance, feet spread, as he had been taught, and remembering the endless training drills, he gripped the grenade hard, down by his abdomen, and pulled it away from the pin rather than the other way around. He took a deep breath, released the safety lever and hurled the grenade in a perfect arc over the shattered rooms and onto the roof.

“Um, you might want to get down just now,” he told the men gathered behind him. Damn, he’d forgotten that part. “Frag out!” He crouched against the wall and hugged Chuqui to him, and the little Indian seemed to understand and curled himself tightly. The MK26A2 was identical to the MK26A1, except for the M217 impact fuse. This neat little item, the “impact-actuated” part, made it go off, not on a timer, but when it hit. This was useful, so long as one did not miss his throw and hit something a little too nearby, in which case one was, as they said, out of luck.

Fortunately, this did not happen, and when the grenade hit the roof, man, did it go off. The boom echoed across the valley and off the mountains behind them, perhaps three miles away. Birds flew up from down the slope and complained away into the distance. Rocks, branches, and rancid body parts rained down around the small band, followed by dust and screams from up on the roof. Chuqui’s eyes were huge, his carnivorous grin about to split his nasty little tattooed face. He turned a gaze of near-worship upon the American; apparently such deadly mayhem was to his liking. Ras grinned right along with the bloodthirsty little cannibal. It was just like old times. He held a hand out toward the astonished Anibal Maraque, and another “lemon,” as the Americans in-country had always called them, was placed carefully in his grasp. This one went over their heads to the roof directly above, with similar results.

It wasn’t until he led the men into the first-floor rooms broken open by the fallen tree that they realized just what that awful smell was. It made sense to Ras when he thought about it. Sure, the zombs would eat the people, but had he really thought they would clean up after themselves? He had always been fastidious when it came to washing the dishes. Zombies, apparently, not so much. It appeared they had eaten one hell of a lot of people and hadn’t cleaned up the least bit of them. The remains lay rotting, congealing into a blackened mass of putrid flesh of arms, legs, faces – or what was left of them. Flies rose in whining clouds and some of the men were vomiting, yet every one of them came on with him as he stepped, barefoot, into the squishy horror of maggots and liquifying human bodies. Ras’ hair stood on end and his own gorge stirred. Chuqui, he noticed, was light enough not to sink into the muck. He alone had his eyes up, looking for the enemy, and not on the grotesque quagmire at his feet.

It was as natural as the day is long for Ras to snap his fingers softly and signal his obvious point man forward. Without so much as a nod, Chuqui was gone, into the dark corridors, almost bouncing along the walls on his tiny feet. They followed behind him in stark revulsion, feet squishing into carpets of rotting flesh, to the hallway of the first floor at the bottom of the ragged gully that had been smashed into the back of the hotel. They trod over windrows of rotting corpses. The beds had soaked up so much blood and gore they were hard to tell from the corrupted flesh. Draperies looked like litmus papers, the nastiness having climbed them like food coloring is sucked up by celery stalks in botany classes. Maggots rolled in waves across a seascape of nightmares. The ceilings were hauntingly close; the ocean of human carcasses was on average two feet deep. At the corridor Ras led them to the right, because Chuqui had gone that way. It led toward the northern corner of the C-shaped building, where the restaurant was. The high-powered flashlight came on, and they plunged grimly into the sucking morass down the hallway.

The first closed room they came to was on the left. Ras could see Chuqui’s footprints in the muck. The little Carib had stayed close to the wall, hadn’t opened any of the doors. Good boy. He waved Mattias past the door and put a comic finger to his lips. As if the defenders didn’t know they were there after two hand grenades had gone off. The giant islander took his place opposite, rifle ready as Ras tried the door. He had to push it open against a reeking corpse. Inside were the putrefying bodies of a man, two women, and an infant. They had all been gutted like deer, their entrails dragged out and the blood sucked up by zombs.

Once-human monsters, he thought, infected by the vampire bacteria and helpless slaves to their need for fresh blood. These people were a family, probably a newlywed couple, their new baby and the woman’s mother. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to scream, puke, or laugh. He was afraid if he started laughing he might never stop. Enjoy your honeymoon on our beautiful island! Jungle paradise! Tell your friends! Oh, yeah, it might be a little late for that. Ras’ eyes wouldn’t come unfastened from the baby. Sure enough going to need a lot of sandbags for that little coffin, now won’t you? Mattias put his massive hand on Ras’ arm, and the American remembered to breathe. Mattias’ comic voice was at once sweet and ridiculous. “Time to go.” Ras swallowed heavily, nodded. They went on.

They tried every door and were met by nothing but death. Two, five, twenty. Men, women, children. Graves, tombs, blood baths. Blood in sprays on walls, puddles on floors and beds and dressers, spotted mirrors, soaked into carpets, flowing out under doors. Blood so thick it had dried into a crust like chocolate syrup frozen onto hand-dipped ice cream cones. Had he reminded himself lately how blood dried brown, not red? Of course he had. How did they get the later victims to come so far in, with the other bodies already rotting everywhere? Were they drugged, seduced? Did the real vampires have some power over human minds? The men were getting flaky, they wanted to get on with it. They turned the corner, and Ras could see daylight from the glass door at the end of the corridor. A sidewalk led down the hill from the door to the back of the restaurant. He could have been in any hotel in Florida. Well, except for the rotting bodies. And the tree that had plunged through the roof of the restaurant, its limbs disappearing into the building like giant invading arms. At the next door on the right, the men grudgingly stood ready as he had instructed them. Three zombs rushed the opening door and deafening gunfire chopped them into bloody salad. It’s an automatic rifle, he thought wildly, and also makes mounds of Julien fries in seconds! The men who fired, almost without thinking, now found new reasons to respect the American’s expertise in close warfare. It seemed as if he knew what he was doing.

— 32 —

A wide stairwell led down into darkness on the right before they got to the outside door. A sign said “Service Persons Only.” A ragged noise echoed up from the silence of concrete walls and quickly escalated into an immense racket. The whole crew fixed anxious eyes down the dark descent. Chuqui flew like a bird from the dim mouth at the top of the stairs, his feet barely touching the floor. He was singing gleefully in his native Kalinago language. “What did he say?” Ras called above the din. At that precise instant, zombs poured up the steps like a tidal wave of pustulent murder. Mattias shouted back, “He say, he found dem!”

Rifles spat fire into the stairwell, shattering the infected horde into writhing fragments. Maraque unlimbered his AK, devastating whole rows of zombs as they charged up the steps. Crowded into the hallway, not all his men could fire without hitting their own. They spread to the left, towards the door, shooting over the rails into the mass of dark bodies farther down the stairs. More zombs clambered over the piles of dead. Ras could generally see a screwing coming a mile down the road; this one was much closer. There were simply too many to shoot them all. Turning to Maraque, he snatched the third of the four grenades from the clip on his vest. The pirate jerked to the side, inadvertently blasting bullets into the ceiling and terrifying his partners. “Ow! That hurt, man!” Ras saw that, along with the “lemon,” he had pulled several hairs from the islander’s matted chest. He grinned. The others laughed madly, continuing to empty their rifles into the screaming zombs. Anibal Maraque slammed another magazine into his Russian murder machine and fired wildly at the attackers. “It’s not funny, man!”

Ras threw the grenade far down the stair well. All his men now knew to duck. They heard a metallic click, and a volcano of flame shot fountains of slime up the stairwell. Arms, heads, and feet flew out to slop on the floor, but Ras’ squad of invaders couldn’t hear the gruesome sounds; their heads were all ringing and hissing after the tremendous blast. A thirty-foot radius of certain death had been contained in a concrete stairwell, and the devastation was enormous. Ras almost felt sorry for the zombs. Then he remembered Darius. He jacked another mag into his own AR and helped shoot down the last of their blood-crazed enemy. As he stood looking down at the ghastly steps, covered in gore, Chuqui spoke to Mattias. The giant spoke to Ras: “He t’ink dey ’spect we’ll come dat way, maybe we should go ’round t’ru de restaurant.” It made sense; the servant’s underground passage must come up in the restaurant on the other end.

Crashing open the glass doors at the end of the hallway, they gathered on the concrete walk that led to the rear of the restaurant, just thirty or forty feet away. “Hold up!” He saw how they followed his orders now, stopping in their tracks. Frightened men were always glad to be told what to do. Ras was shaken by the destruction to the front of the hotel that confronted them. The entire parking lot, the circular driveway with its fountain, and the garden wall had collapsed down the mountain with the landslide. The entire section of road in front was gone; trees lay tumbled down the slope, their roots in the air. Those to the sides of the slide had had their roots dragged from under them, pitching them back or sideways onto the hotel grounds.

“Who here,” and he stared around at them, “has ever killed a real vampire?” A few men looked down and shuffled their feet, while Mattias and Anibal openly shook their heads. “Not me, man,” Maraque said. “How can you get that close? I mean, to put a stake in him…ho, man, you gotta get close. Too God-damned close for me, for fucking sure.” Ras was still struck by how much this Greek/African/Carib hybrid sounded so much like Cheech Marin on the old movie Up in Smoke.

Chuqui stood by Ras like his sergeant, clearly weighing what was being discussed. He spoke aside to Mattias Goodwill, who replied in the singsong Carib tongue. Chuqui spoke again at length. By now everyone was listening to their conversation instead of to Ras, which irritated the shit right out of the American. He stood with his arms crossed like a pissed-off high school teacher. Mattias turned to him.

“He say he kills t’ree vampires. To kill de vampire is easy, only use de arrow or de spear, for dey are made of wood, and you must get it in his heart.” Ras stared at the little Carib. “You’ve killed three vampires? How do you know they’re really dead?” Chuqui chattered knowingly. In spite of the language barrier, Ras could tell he was now a man giving a lecture on a well-known subject. Mattias’ high, cartoon voice sounded absurd in the humid daylight. “Vampires been here a long time, he say. His peoples, it seem like dey be immune to de infection. Dey bury de vampire wit’ a hardwood stake in his heart, but also put him under a tree and train a root to grow right t’ru de vampire chest, into de heart. Also, de tree help hold him down for de required time. Of course, nobody mess around on de Carib Reserve, not even de vampire. You mess wit’ somet’ing and dey don’t like it, you might be taking de Carib Leap youself.” Chuqui nodded, smiling broadly, his sharp little teeth shining in the morning light. It was not lost on the American that whether he spoke it much or not, the Carib seemed to understand English just fine.

Great, Ras thought. You show up, at an away game yet, dressed out to play some serious ball, and find out you don’t have the right gear. He wished he’d grilled Darius more thoroughly before he’d gone and gotten himself killed. “Now wait a minute. Does anybody know if a bullet will hurt them at all? I mean, you maybe can’t kill him with it, but can you even hurt him with it?” At this, Maraque spoke up. “Uncle Estaphan told me once—” The others hooted in derision. “Shut up, man!” Maraque said. “He’s my uncle! Anyway, he told he shot one once with a shotgun. Blew his chest right the fuck out, and it fell down. Looked like it was dead, but he said in a few minutes it got back up! It was all torn to shit, man, but the old man just barely had time to get away.”

Ras thought disgustedly, I cannot believe we are standing here, maybe twenty meters from our target, debating how – or even if – we can actually kill the enemy. This operation was so incredibly fucked up he felt as if he were back in the US Army.

Ras asked, “Has anyone ever asked any of the Caribs about this?” It was awfully quiet. A red thrasher, a bird Ras often saw back in Florida, landed on the shattered edge of the restaurant roof. Anibal, clearly embarrassed, looked like a boy about to scuff his foot. “We don’t talk to him. He’s a fuckin’ cannibal, man! Most of us don’ speak no Kalinago anyway, and they don’t much like to speak Englais.” Ras looked at Mattias. “Kalinago?”

“It’s what dey call dey language, from what dey call demselves, de Kalina.” Ras’ mouth hung open. The Kalinas had apparently survived what, maybe centuries of vampire incursions? They were the only people who had any idea what to do, and they hadn’t been interrogated, even by the guys who called themselves vampire killers? And it was so damned obvious. Spears. Bows and arrows. Made of wood.

Well, bows and arrows were in short supply. In fact, the only one he had seen on the island was now slung over Chuqui’s shoulder, and besides, they were not toys, to be mastered on the spot. He was a fair shot with a bow but damned if he could make one, and the making of accurate arrows, his history books had taught him, was the work of master craftsmen. He shook his head.

“My friends, it is time to make ourselves some spears. Some long, sharp spears.” The cutlasses, always literally to hand, even when the men carried automatic weapons, went to work. In no time at all, a dozen very nice hardwood saplings that had graced the gardens of the hotel lawn became their low-tech offense against the unknown enemy.

Double glass doors opened into the back of the restaurant. They might have been painted black; not a spark of light showed inside. Mattias pulled the doors open and expertly flipped down the little stoppers with his foot to hold them open. He saw Ras looking at him sideways and shrugged. He grinned at the American. “I was an usher at my church, growin’ up.” Ras nodded, smiling, bemused. “Me too. Hell, I was an altar boy. I was even in the choir.” The enormous black man looked down on him, astonished, as if this, among all the incredible horror they had seen, was the one thing he could not believe. He turned and ducked – he literally had to duck – into the dimness behind those doors.

A feeble yellow light glowed around the tree limbs where they had punched through the roof in the storm. Tables and chairs had been smashed and thrown aside in these areas, while water dripped in from the daily rains to rot and stain. In other places, tables and chairs sat untouched, dinnerware immaculately set, tablecloths and napkins jarringly, perfectly white. One falling branch had slammed into the chest of the lone diner and held him pinned to a punctured table, his back to the intruders. As they stepped carefully toward the body, gazing around fearfully, his gruesome feast was revealed. A muscular form lay on the table before the staked corpse, his chest torn open and most of the internal organs consumed. Flies swarmed both bodies, while maggots writhed like a living blanket of filth over all. There was surprisingly little blood. Ras’ bones froze in recognition: it was the long-haired French body-builder from the airplane. Ras felt vaguely guilty for wondering whether his gorgeous girlfriend had escaped. He hoped so.

The man with the branch in his heart was no man. He was a vampire, a real one, no question about it. His skin had turned an ugly brown, wrinkled like old tobacco leaves. Dead, sunken eyes in emaciated flesh cursed the giant, living wooden stake that had skewered him. He wore a ridiculous powder-blue polyester leisure suit with a horrid green-patterned Hawaiian shirt that, Ras thought nastily, so did not match. Clothing he had obviously taken from the now-rotting victims in the halls. As big as it was, the suit still wasn’t big enough, riding high on the thing’s arms and up his legs like what the old folks would have called “high-water” pants. Brand-name sandals from America were jammed on feet too gnarled and beastly to qualify as human. His head was huge. His forehead was too high, and his sharp, elongated teeth forced his bloody, streaming jaws into an open grimace. Unnaturally long arms lay on the table, palms up, fingers like fat sausages, sporting nails like the claws of a bear. Sunken flesh revealed bones and tendons that were all wrong. The ugly shirt was open enough for Ras to see how the ribs seemed to have thickened into a nearly solid cage, presumably to protect the living heart of the vampire. Ras remembered Darius’ words about their mythical strength. Unlike the zombs, real vampires clearly had the bones and musculature to withstand the forces that using their strength would require.

Chuqui was firing a barrage of Kalinago at Mattias again, gesturing at the monster on the table, but when the big man turned to explain, Ras held up his hand. “I know. But this one’s all right for now. We will come back later and see to him properly.” We’d fucking well better, too, the American thought grimly. No way that branch, undoubtedly not cut at the proper time of the moon, would last anything like twenty years. And what would happen, he wondered, if someone came along and took it out? Thought they had some kind of scientific freak, and wanted to make a million off it? Would the fucker come back to life? Really? Ras’d accepted a lot already that would have driven most people barking mad. But somebody dead is, well, dead. Weren’t they?

Anibal Maraque hissed from behind them, motioning to the kitchen. Their fresh “spears” clattering into tables and chairs, they stepped warily through the gloom towards the kitchen. Light shone through the eye-level windows in the swinging double doors. Ras stepped up and peered through. Down the length of the brightly-lit kitchen, all shiny stainless steel, ran two side-lines and a central work island. On his left against the wall were the fryers, griddles, and ovens, and a gleaming fan-hood hung above them like a giant mouth ready to gobble them up. Opposite the fry-line were high and low counters on the center island for preparing the meats and breads for roasting or baking. Looked like the far end was for bread; the surfaces were lower for hand-kneading, and the bread oven was right there at the end of the fry-line, under the hood. The meat-cutting slabs on the near end were taller, providing a better surface for hand-cutting steaks. On the far side was the salad line, the sign of a true five-star restaurant. Second-rate joints pre-made their salads the night before. He noted approvingly that the cooler was at the back end of the salad line, so fresh ingredients could be prepared while still as cold as possible. He bet at one time those salads were top of the line.

His dead buddy Chuck, who had been an international master chef, had taught him all about commercial kitchens. Chuck had been the chef on the Seward Johnson, the research vessel from the famous Harbor Branch Institute for Marine Sciences in Fort Pierce, Florida. Chuck had once shown Ras a tiny Styrofoam coffee cup he said he had taken with him in the Institute’s submersible, when they had gone down to around six thousand feet in the Puerto Rico Trench. The researchers had told him to write his name on it, and when it shrank from the pressure, the writing became so small, you needed a magnifier to read it. It proved, Chuck said, that he didn’t fake it, nobody could write that small. It had never occurred to Ras for one second to doubt what Chuck was saying. Chuck was still dead. Given the circumstances of Chuck’s death, Ras sincerely hoped Chuck would forgive him if Ras preferred he stayed that way; he’d had quite enough of dead people walking around, thank you.

On the far-right wall was the boiler line, where rice, soups, stews, and no doubt the incomparable callaloo were prepared. At the far end of that wall were two deep sinks with three spigots and a rinse-hose on an overhead spring, all for prepping dishes for the dishwasher. This was a square metal robot on steel legs, something from a sci-fi horror novel. Ras thought that the dishwasher, animated, unleashed from its pipes and hoses, might easily take care of a significant number of zombs in its own right.

He knew the kitchen would slow them down. They would have to split around the central island, and go in two single files towards the rear, into a darkness that could only spell stairs. The twin of the bloodstained stairwell over in the hotel no doubt waited in that darkness. Ras said nothing for a moment, not daring to believe the zombs didn’t know they were here. He was sure someone with combat experience was giving them their orders, someone who could control their madness. Darius had said it: someone who knew what they were doing was directing traffic. That had never happened before. Uncle Charlie, he reflected, had been on the front lines in Korea.

As a child he had, at every family dinner, heard Charlie telling his war stories. He was a supply sergeant at the Chosin Reservoir when the Chinese came through the hills. The men in their front lines sprayed automatic rifle fire everywhere. When you shot down the one with the weapon, the guy behind him picked it up and charged in his place, firing madly. There seemed to be no end to them. They kept on coming, no matter how many the multi-national forces guarding the border killed, until, finally, those forces began to retreat. It turned into an all-out rout. Americans, English, French, they all ran. Except for the Turks, Charlie had told a mesmerized young Erasmus Taft. They wore little red Fez hats, with tassels hanging from the tops, and some of them would not run. Or, if they did, they would run only so far and then they would stop. And when they stopped, they would turn and face the enemy, and the first thing they did was throw down that funny little round hat. When they did that, they intended to run no farther. They stood their ground and fought the Chinese as they came. Charlie had always been the friendly redneck from Savannah, Georgia, skinny, funny, harmless, wearing the sleeveless wife-beater undershirt – only nobody called them wife-beaters back then. Black hair framed his dorky pumpkin head. He was drinking buddies with those Turks; nobody else in his platoon could keep up with them, but Charlie got respect. Charlie could suck down some alcohol, for sure and for certain. He admired them. He was their friend, and they told him things.

There had been a contingent of Turkish cooks, Charlie said, a dozen or so, and they got sick of cooking and wanted to fight. They hadn’t come all this way to cook kurusfalsulye and manti; they wanted to shed some blood and win some glory. Beans and dumplings weren’t what they wanted to brag about to the girls if they ever got home, and whether they did or not seemed of little importance to them. So, they stole a truck, and, with nothing but their wicked kitchen knives, they drove to the first Chinese checkpoint they could find and killed all the chinks and took their weapons. Then they went up the road, killing every enemy guard they could find, collecting noses from all the corpses for proof. An entire UN brigade had followed them, rolling unopposed through nine Chinese roadblocks littered with enemy dead, and found the dozen Turks drunk on rice wine at a Chinese command post that looked like a slaughterhouse. After killing the enemy staff, the Turks had set up in their mess and, stepping over the bodies, had a huge dinner of rice, pork, and kimchee waiting for the Allied forces when they arrived. Charlie swore he personally saw one hundred and thirty-seven noses, and the Turks claimed loudly that they hadn’t had time to get them all. One Turk had been injured; his left thumb had been shot off, and they all, including the one shot, thought it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Charlie remembered him laughing madly, waving the thumbless hand wrapped in a Chinese colonel’s scarf and guzzling a bottle of the rice wine until it poured down his cheeks.

Charlie had told young Erasmus that a Turk never went anywhere without his Fez, and once they threw it down and turned to face the enemy, it was victory or death. There were an awful lot of Chinese, Charlie would say, so ya know how that went. Victory was really not an option. The Turks’ chosen option, he said, was a glorious death. When the combined forces returned and took that land back, fighting bitterly every step of the way, they would find those Turks, frozen and dead, surrounded by ten or twenty or fifty of the enemies they had killed before they fell. Those words of his Uncle Charlie had always been with Ras, had always fascinated him, had informed his time in Southeast Asia. Turn and face the enemy. Victory or death.

His men would get bunched up in the kitchen, he thought. What do you do about that? Have to go through there no matter what. He considered another hand grenade, but shredding perfectly good restaurant equipment seemed like an awful waste of the last one. Besides, he thought madly, the Turks wouldn’t have done that. Fuck it, he thought. Turn and face the enemy. Victory or death. He signaled the vampire hunters forward and blasted through the doors at a dead run.

— 33 —

They were waiting all right. As Ras pounded past the fryer line on the left, the zombs charged up the stairs directly in front of him. The men who had gone to the right had to come around the cooler from the salad line before they could fire. What Ras saw then almost distracted him enough for the zombs to get him. On the counter to his right – the meat-prep counter, his shattered mind wailed – was the dismembered corpse of the beautiful schoolgirl, the girl he’d given a ride down the mountain so the important town-fellow could make it with her mother. Her ravaged body was wide open, her skin a sickening yellow. Her open eyes stared in horror. Her organs were gone. Her ribs, cut away with meat saws, lay in two square sections on the counter past her head. One faced downward with the bones showing, looking like pork spare ribs. The other lay with the skin up, her adolescent breast centered towards the top.

Ras bellowed like a speared lion, falling to his knees, terror mounting on despair. Zombies screamed diseased madness. Anibal’s AK-47 exploded over Ras’ left shoulder, throwing the attackers back, splattering slime on the walls. A dozen rifles opened up, some even braving Maraque’s wild firing to shoot left-handed around the cooler, unloading blindly into the mass of screeching black flesh. Mattias Goodwill pulled Ras to his feet and helped him on. Before they entered the stairwell, Ras stopped him. His voice was rough, ragged from screaming, but his training was still prodding him.

“Send some men back the other way. Come in behind them from the hotel”? Goodwill motioned two of the men to him and gave them instructions. Chuqui joined them and they raced away. Ras was heartened by their eagerness; he just hoped the sight of daylight and safe jungle before their eyes wouldn’t tempt them to run. He owed it to Darius to finish this nest of reptiles. Mattias held him steady as they approached the stairs. When two zombs came shrieking up at them Ras summoned the nerve to fire his weapon. Splattering them seemed to do him some good.

The stairs, now piled with zombie dead, ended only about twenty feet down in a dark corridor, and the heavy-duty flashlights were turned on. A few zombs hid behind trash cans or serving carts, trying to ambush them. Anibal and the others cut them down and left them jittering and screaming, bouncing around on the floor as they died. The corridor opened into what looked like an underground warehouse. This shallow cave was where all the supplies needed to run a five-star hotel and restaurant were stored, as well as housing the laundry. At the far end was an enclosed break room made of something like Styrofoam covered with aluminum foil. It had windows on the two sides he could see, and an air conditioner on top that took in and vented air through shiny ducts that exited out the roof of the cave. The break room occupied the majority of the cramped cave while the storage racks lined either side of the corridor Ras and his troop had come through. The laundry was crammed into a tiny side room to his left accoutered with shiny machines looking as though they hadn’t been used in a while. How long could these feastings on guests have been going on? Ras remembered Darius’ explanations of how humans could ignore plain evidence of wildly unnatural events. But still. How long before relatives would want to know where their vacationing kin got off to? How long could the impenetrable Caribbean lassitude known as “Island Time” hide evidence of such slaughter? Not forever, surely not.

The scene could have been the back rooms in any hotel or department store in Florida. Well, except that the shelves had been thrown down, with linens and towels piled everywhere, and dishes smashed across the floor. For some reason there were no corpses carpeting the floor here, and Ras remembered there were none in the restaurant either. Maybe real vampires, with all the slave labor and everything, could afford the luxury of dining exclusively, like the ugly bastard skewered by the fallen tree. The image of the schoolgirl’s expertly butchered body arose in his mind, and he whimpered in actual pain. Mattias gripped his upper arm for a moment, looked him in the eye and nodded. Ras nodded back, and they set off.

Nine men advanced across the stone floor, walking between the piles of sheets and overturned shelves. They were unaccustomed to the clumsy spears and kept cracking them into each other, in what Ras jokingly thought of as the “Laurel and Hardy” routine. Anibal Maraque and Mattias Goodwill stood to either side of him, and he felt as safe as a man could expect, considering, well, vampires and all. Their powerful torches sent tubes of light in crazy arcs as they hustled across the floor. Armies of shadows danced about them on every wall. Rifles spat flame here and there, ear-splitting booms in the dark cavern, as a few more zombs came at them, but it really seemed as though they had killed most of them. When Ras saw the wide stairway going up to the left behind the break room, surely where it went into the hotel, he began to wonder where Chuqui had got off to. Fucking Indians anyway.

They reached the break room with its darkened windows, where they all expected at least more zombs, if not real vampires. They spread out to either side and, as if they had planned it, just opened up on the windows without a word. The explosion of rifle fire deafened already-battered ears as the windows blew in with the force of a hurricane of lead. Zombie screams echoed out over the barrage of gunfire, and both went on for what seemed like endless interminable minutes. Ras reloaded three times, and the booming continued.

Finally, there were no more screams and no more firing. Ras knew he had lost all control of this operation, but then again he’d never really been in charge of it anyway. He wondered if it was over. To his right, Anibal was creeping cautiously behind his weapon to peer into the dim remains of the break room. What he saw didn’t seem to surprise him, and the two men with him shone their lights on a twitching mass of dead and dying zombs. Ras looked to his left, down the side of the break room towards the stairs. Mattias was inching forward to look in the windows too, and there were three men to his left shining torches around. The lights were glaring off the aluminum wallboard of the room, blinding him. His neck-hairs stood to attention and he opened his mouth to warn his guys off.

A roaring filled the cavern, coming from every side, echoing off the walls. They all fired into the shadows but their rifles sounded like cap guns next to the awful bellowing that was overwhelming every ear. A massive form like a giant spider dropped from the darkness above, snatched the man farthest to the left, and bounded with him back to the top of the break room. The man’s screams and the crunching of his bones sounded weak after the creature’s roaring voice. The men ran together, crying out in fear, firing their weapons up into the gloom above the break room. Ras’ mind was screaming in terror, his teeth chattering. He realized, at least, that this must be a real vampire and therefore their guns were useless.

“Spears! Get your spears up! If it comes at you, try to stab it! Stab it!” He was screaming the last words in a nearly hysterical state. He was pretty sure they were all going to die, and very soon. Their pathetic wooden sticks would do nothing against this monstrous behemoth, big as a gorilla and apparently as acrobatic. They all slung their rifles and raised their makeshift spears in the humid air. All but one.

Anibal Maraque was no coward. He’d never have become a zombie killer if he was. On the other hand, he absolutely did not want to die in this underground shitbox, eaten by some asshole vampire. His uncle Astaphan (okay, the old man probably was his real Dad, not that he could bring himself to care right now) had knocked one down with a shotgun and it had given him time to get away. He figured that was just what he was up for right now. Knock it down; get away. He plucked the last limon, as the mad white man called them, from his bandolier, careful not to pull any more of his dwindling chest hairs. He was lucky to have any left with that white fucker pulling them out like that. God damn it, Famietta loved his chest hairs…her lush body was in his mind as he mimed the moves Ras had shown him. Wide stance. Grip grenade low in front of the body in the right hand, first finger on left hand through pull ring. Pull grenade from pin, not the other way around, thereby pulling the right arm back for the throw. Strong overhand toss. In the sudden silence, Ras heard the distinctive ping as the detonator lever, or “spoon,” of the MK26A2 was flung away by the actuator spring. “No!” he shouted, knowing he was too late. He was too rattled to say anything more to save his fellows. He turned and ran for the piles of shelves and goods and dived behind the nearest cover. He stuck his fingers as far down his ear canals as he could, and opened his mouth wide.

The concussion lifted him off the floor. The boom nearly burst his eardrums in spite of his fingers. The break room structure collapsed with a shattering roar. Two of his men, still standing at the corner of the building, took the full force of the explosion from less than thirty feet away. The foam walls and ceiling of the break room didn’t even slow down the shrapnel from the grenade. It detonated on the roof of the room, showering them with steel fragments like an artillery air burst. They were thrown backward by the shock wave, their faces shredded and bodies bloodied.

Fragments spanged off the metal shelving, shattered more dishes, clattered off the walls. Ras’ head felt like a baseball just slammed into the stands for a homer. Blood gushed from his nose as he tried to rise. Near him he saw Mattias and two of the other men. The one with his rasta dreads in a knit cap of red, yellow, and green was out on the floor, blood running from his ears. Mattias and the other man were curled on their sides, holding hands to their ears in agony. Their mouths writhed but Ras couldn’t hear them screaming. A single powerful flashlight, abandoned, shone straight up at the roof of the cavern, lighting the scene through a cloud of roiling dust.

Struggling to his knees, Ras peered over the racks and the piles of towels and tablecloths that had saved him from the explosion. Seven hundred feet. That was how far away that hand grenade could kill, in every direction. It wasn’t like in the god-damned movies! The whole place wasn’t two hundred feet from end to end. Fucking crazy pirate. You had to know what you were doing to use those things.

“Maraque!” Ras called out, and was surprised to hear his own voice above the high ringing in his ears. A muffled groan from the back stairs told him the damn fool was there, and at least shell-shocked, lucky not to have been killed outright by his own grenade. “Hey, dumbass, you all right?” Nothing. “Cause if you are, see, then I gotta come over there and kick your ass myself, you fucking idiot!” The groaning started up again. His marvelous humor went unappreciated as well, it seemed. Where the hell were that Indian and his other two men? A guy could use a little help.

A nasty, slithering sound came from the remains of the break room. The roof had sagged almost to the level of the floor, until it had presumably come to rest on the mangled bodies of the zombs slaughtered when the hunters first arrived. The sound got louder, and a dark mass seemed to gather, congeal almost, near the tilted air conditioner. A ghastly crackling reached his battered ears while his eyes were drawn to movement in the stairwell. Dim figures, slipping in the mire of dead zombs, dragged the comatose Anibal back up the stairs. He hoped it was flankers come to the rescue and not more zombs, but right then he was so pissed off at Maraque he didn’t give a shit if they ate him or not.

Whatever was moving in the ruins of the break room was becoming more active, and Ras was deathly afraid he knew exactly what it was. Somehow the vampire had survived the explosion and was…what, reconstituting itself? If one could recover from a shotgun blast, why not a hand grenade? He imagined those massive rib bones, encasing the infected heart, protecting it from destruction. Then what? How could it put itself back together? And, he thought, sick with fear, what would it do when it had?

The only thing that made sense was to try to kill it now, while it was blown apart. Maybe it was vulnerable. He shivered at the thought of trying to shove a spear through heavy, flat ribs like those of the monstrosity in the restaurant. He turned back to what was left of his men behind the racks. Mattias was crouched over the rasta. The man was on his stomach, his hands no longer over his ears. When Goodwill turned, Ras caught his eye and he knew. Goodwill rested the man’s head back down to the floor, where he stared, glassy-eyed and dead, at the pool of his own blood. Ras gritted his teeth, cursing under his breath. That was a third man dead from Maraque’s stupid move. Four gone, counting the one the vampire had snatched.

He motioned Mattias forward and tugged the other man’s elbow. Down on his knees, the fellow opened his eyes as if he could not believe he was alive. Ras recognized him; it was the little yellow porter with the sunken eyes who had tried to muscle his luggage at the airport. He was also the man who had sprinted for the back of the hotel, and, even though he had caught a stone to the shoulder, had leapt up and come bravely on. Ras helped him to his feet. The man’s hands were covered with blood from his ears and nose. “Are you all right? What is your name?” The man shook his head, his mouth open and his deep eyes sad. That man would be deaf for the rest of his life.

Ras took the man’s heavy flashlight and clambered over the downed shelving, picking up one of the spears. He looked to Mattias and the other man. They stared like zombies themselves for a few heartbeats and then climbed over to pick up spears too. They joined him, and Mattias leaned down to Ras, although he kept his eyes on the shaking body of the vampire. “His name,” Mattias told him, “is Primm.” Ras stopped in amazement. He had been rude to Primm at the airport. God had apparently not appreciated that and had told him so Himself. God had in fact called Primm His man in Ras’ dream in the cave, and had told Ras he needed to be here. He turned to the man but had no idea how to speak to him, a man claimed by God Himself, a man Ras had dragged into the jaws of Hell. All he could do was pat Primm on the shoulder. Primm looked at him as if he had lost his mind. Ras was absolutely certain Primm was right.

They turned to the blasted break room and stepped up onto the collapsed roof, shining a torch ahead of them. The crackling was getting louder. First they saw the body of the man the vampire had grabbed, or what was left of it. His chest had been bitten open by massive jaws filled with elongated teeth, his innards were ripped out, and his left leg was gone. The battered air conditioner showed blast marks, and one whole side was burned black. Beyond it, the torch lit a scene of horror.

The enormous body was just a trunk, all the limbs had been blown away. Yet the body quivered, in fact it vibrated, while all around it blood seemed to gather. He was not imagining it; the blood was running into that awful corpse, not out of it. A piece of shoulder slithered towards the body here, an ear laboriously wriggled through the blood and slime there. This grotesque monstrosity was indeed putting itself back together! He, Primm, and Mattias all stabbed repeatedly at it as it twitched and convulsed, but they could not penetrate the heavy ribcage without hitting the right spot, and the awful thing would not stay still long enough for them to find it.

Ras set the flashlight on top of the air conditioner so that it shone on the vampire. He had wondered just how the real vampire, as Darius had said, “called” the zombs to him. He was seeing it now. The infected heart was what made this dead flesh live, what animated it. Attached or not, the heart could call to the flesh infected with its own bacteria, make it do what the vampire wanted. An awful sound like a one-legged man splashing in a mud puddle caused them to turn in alarm. Across the bumpy, slime-covered landscape of aluminum foil and yellow structural foam, the vampires great head was flopping, first one cheek, then the other, towards the body. Slop. Pause. Flop. Pause.

Primm was looking from the American to Mattias. He did not hear that gruesome head rolling towards the bouncing, rippling body. He damn sure saw the white man’s hair stand on end, though, and saw his eyes go wide in terror. He turned and beheld the head as it slid the last few inches through the blood and mess. He watched it twist around until it matched the neck, which jerked and writhed on the flapping roof material. When it slid against the neck it reattached itself, and instantly the head snapped around to stare at the intruders with its shattered, bloody eyes. What looked like multiple rows of razor-sharp teeth held the great jaws open, the lips like a flat, rubbery gash. Unnerved at last, Primm dropped his spear and ran.

Had Ras imagined it would help, he would have run too. It just didn’t occur to him. He was sure if he turned his back, it would get him. The skin on the face was burned and blasted, but as Ras stood in shock before it, the eyes filled out to glowing red orbs, and the flesh flowed back together. Those horrid eyes locked on his and a huffing roar came from the vampire’s throat. Its enormous ribcage was swelling and flexing. Growls and grunts like mating water buffalo echoed around the chamber. Ras tried to look away from those eyes but could not. Most of an elongated arm rolled to the vampire’s body, and the instant the arm reattached, the monster began writhing towards the two men left standing. Ras whimpered, staring into those malevolent, glowing eyes.

A jarring shove to the shoulder sent Ras staggering, but it broke his concentration on the vampire’s eyes and he was free from their spell. Fear rushed through him again, and he looked at Mattias, who had saved him. “Kill the son of a bitch,” Mattias said. “Don’t look at its eyes. Kill it!” Ras immediately sprang toward the advancing horror and again began stabbing wildly with the hardwood spear. Mattias was right behind him, both of them screaming like madmen, flailing with their eight-foot shafts.

The vampire was not only tough, it was fast. As they thrust down at the swollen body, it twisted, bounced, and spun. Its recently reattached arm swung to draw them in, and its huge teeth snapped at their legs with a clash like a steel bear trap. Their spears slid and glanced across the vampire’s thick chest and back, gouging ineffective, shallow wounds that only let in more of the gathering blood. Ras and Mattias were ankle-deep in it. Ras thought again that he might begin to laugh. He knew that if he did, though, they would both die, because he would, from that heartbeat on, be forever hopelessly insane. No going back; they were talking one-way ticket here. Immediate death at the hands of a creature from a horror movie, or a permanent bed complete with four-point restraints and padded wallpaper – to protect the staff, of course, in the beautiful “social services” wing of an isolated hospital somewhere in the woods of the Panhandle. Florida had an excellent mental-health system.

None of that particular little nightmare would happen, however, because this undying vampire would eat them both. The nightmare was right here, right now. Massive legs rolled, squishing through the goop out of the darkness, and now the vampire became nearly whole. With two legs, one arm, no hands and no feet, it stood, almost seven feet tall. Mattias and Ras lurched back in fright. The vampire flexed its huge lungs and roared, a shaking rumble like a freight train in a tunnel. A blast of putrid air from the grave gusted their hair back, and something nasty landed on Ras’ shirt. Screaming won’t save you, he thought. He was positive he was going to scream anyway. He looked down at the slime on his shirt; he looked at Mattias. He laughed. It sounded like the laugh of a madman. It was.

They both screamed, Mattias’ high schoolgirl voice rising through the octaves. Pieces flew to the vampire and now it had hands, feet, everything. Black, rotten blood ran up its legs and into every hole, natural or otherwise. Ras was revolted by the monstrous gangling cock – as long as a man’s arm – hanging between those legs, even as he was nauseated by seeing the blood run into it. The vampire looked down on them. Ras felt like one of the last two chickens in the coop. Even if they eat the other one today, what about tomorrow?

It’s bound to come, that’s what, he thought, and lowered his spear for another try. In a few seconds, he figured, the vampire would eat one of them. Maybe the other could get a shot at it while it was busy. Probably not, but what did they have to lose? Turn and face the enemy. Victory or death. He spoke to Mattias without taking his eyes from the vampire. “If it takes me first, try to get your spear in it.” He felt more than saw the big man nod. He too watched the vampire, keeping his gaze away from its eyes.

But the creature did not attack right away. Squatting down, it seemed to be working on itself, vibrating and shaking as it had before it was whole again. The horrific internal injuries, Ras thought, must take time to be repaired. He doubted it was a good idea to allow it time to mend like this, but it was already too dangerous for them to have any real chance of killing it. He wondered now if they could possibly escape, and maybe with what they had learned today come back and hope to kill it another day. Then the vampire spoke.

— 34 —

“Erasmus? Is that you?” It was a voice like a dump truck unloading gravel, a grinding sound that should not come from any set of lips, no matter how far from truly human. The huge head still wore that scant halo of thin black hair, now mostly grey. The face had somehow retained that dumbass country-boy expression. There was no doubt about it.

“Uncle Charlie.” Mattias Goodwill stared at Ras with that wide-eyed expression only black people are capable of, as if Ras were a vampire too. In that minute, Erasmus Taft was as close to that nice upstate institution and his daily dose of anti-psychotic drugs as most people ever get and still draw one more sane breath in this life. “Mom…s-sent me af-after you. T-to see how you were, ah, doing. She was worried. You…you know how she worries…” Ras was babbling. The vampire – Uncle Charlie – continued to twitch and shake.

“Ohhh,” Charlie considered, a sound like a diesel engine block dragged across a garage floor, with a little dose of rusted chains thrown in. “You could tell her, I’m getting’ along…only,” and here his train wreck of a voice sounded a bit sad, “you won’t be leavin’ now, will ya?” Ras had to admit it: he really didn’t think so. He had two choices here, and those were to kill this monster or die trying. After all the mayhem they had wreaked on Charlie’s domain, there was no chance in hell he would ever let them go. Not, of course, that it had ever been a possibility; vampires didn’t let people go, it wasn’t in their nature. They ate them. Looked like the old story about vampires’ human helpers was a myth too. Mattias leaned down into Ras’ face, all trace of the amiable, church-going fellow gone. In his agitation he reverted to his local vernacular.

“What de fuck is goin’ on, man? You fuckin’ know him? What is dis, a trap or somet’ing, man?” Betrayal was written plainly on his big black face. Ras shrugged. “He’s my uncle. My mom did send me. That’s why I’m here.” He looked back to where Charlie still stood, doing whatever he was doing, shaking his head. “Never imagined he’d be a fucking vampire, man. I figured he just drank himself to death. I didn’t even believe in vampires. And I wish I still didn’t.” Mattias seemed calmed somewhat, but they were both still looking right at death, not twenty feet away.

Broken crockery clattered behind Ras and he was tempted to turn around, but his eyes would not leave the vampire. The two men who had gone with Chuqui appeared beside them and picked up spears dropped by the others. Primm had come back with them. He shrugged a little at Ras and grasped his own spear once again. His sunken eyes in his yellow face showed white all around, but he stood his ground. Tears came to Ras’ own eyes and he grasped the little man by the shoulder. God bless them, he thought, with five men maybe they had a chance, otherwise this horror would continue. Ras wouldn’t mind dying quite so much if he knew they had killed the beast. Charlie the vampire still shook and quivered, but all the awful blood had been sucked back up into him. Where had the little cannibal got off to? Ras wondered.

The men held their spears like javelins, overhead with one hand, like Africans did in the old movies. There was a television in nearly every house, shack, and mansion in Dominica, and Ras assumed that was where they had gotten the idea; these men had never held spears before in their lives. If the weapon of the day had only been the ubiquitous cutlass, he mourned briefly, they would have been truly lethal. Somehow, he gathered his scattered nerve and spoke like the long-lost officer and gentleman who had once inhabited his abused body.

“Respect, my friends. Please hold your spears like this, underhand with both hands, like a bayonet on a rifle. Use it to jab.” He saw them shift their grips, knew they understood. Those TVs showed war movies too. His training told him that a confident leader always calmed the men, and although he had been more of a spook than a line grunt, that training seemed to work now. As if it had read his mind, the thing before them spoke in that awful ratcheting voice.

“Battalion First Lieutenant Taft, son, you a G-2, you Intelligence. Ya know that ain’t gonna help you….” The other men twitched looks between them and at the white man, but Mattias nodded and put out his hand, and they stood fast. “All right,” Ras said in a harsh voice himself, “let’s kill this fucker.” They grouped together and moved in on the horrible thing, which groaned and shook on the fallen foam roof. Charlie turned to face them. The spears, points all gathered towards the chest of the vampire, rattled together, shaking with the fears of the men who held them.

“Ras,” that awful, gravelly voice spoke again, “you always were stupid. You should’ve run.” The men were gazing at Ras wide-eyed, but the American was shaking his head. “Not this time, Charlie. Remember, you must’ve told me a hundred times. The Turks. Turn and face the enemy. Victory or death.” Ras lowered his lance and, screaming his fear and defiance, his men gave a shout, and they charged. The vampire roared like an enraged elephant, and leaped into the air to land on top of them.

His monstrous bulk smashed one of Chuqui’s men to the floor, shattering his bones and killing him instantly. Blood exploded from his body and covered them. Hardwood spear shafts cracked like toothpicks, scattering bloody shards and splinters across the floor. Another returned ambusher still held his spear, stabbing like a trooper, but the point could not find an opening between those thick ribs. It just slid across that giant chest, slashing dead flesh to no advantage. It was the bravest thing Ras had ever seen, and he had an instant to be proud. Ras and Mattias were now knocked together and swept aside by an iron-hard arm that went on to grasp that spearman by the neck. The massive hand tightened its horrid grip and the man’s eyes bulged from his face. With a grisly crackle, his neck bones parted, and the vampire snatched his head from his body. He flipped the head around to sink his grotesque teeth into the jetting arteries, and sucked brains and all out of it with a satisfied gulp. Sweet Jesus, Ras thought, he’s taking the time to eat us right here. We never had any chance at all.

Having been bowled over to the side by Mattias’ bulk, Ras caught a glimpse of brown skin and tattoos in the shadows thrown by the torch. Chuqui stepped up on the fallen air conditioner behind Charlie, with his tiny bow and one pathetic arrow.

The American almost laughed. It would be like shooting a tank with a BB gun. He knew Chuqui had no hope of success, but Ras snatched up a piece of broken spear and went after Charlie one more time anyway, just to draw its attention away from the Indian. His yell brought the vampire around and Charlie looked at his nephew like one would a nice rare steak. “I was gonna save you for last.” Then he batted Ras’ lame little stick from his grasp so fast and hard Ras’ arm went numb, and the spear flew across the cavern and clattered on the far wall. He was raked by those terrible claws and knocked to the floor with a broken right arm. Charlie descended upon him like a raging dinosaur with a giant, saw-toothed face right out of Hell. Ras scooted backward in desperation, screaming in raw terror.

Chuqui loosed his tiny arrow. The vampire jerked upright with an ear-shattering screech so loud it rattled chips of rock and dirt from the roof of the cave. It continued to roar, suddenly vomiting a gush of black, rotting blood out onto the floor, and all over Erasmus Taft, whose own screams were completely drowned out by those of the monster, which fell backward, still spewing a ten-foot fountain of vile blood and half-digested organs.

Ras was scrabbling in the blood, puking, crying like a lost child, trying to escape the horror before him but unable to stand and run. Thick black slime covered his face and body; only his eyes and teeth showed, wild and mad, from the ghastly mask of blood. When Mattias and Primm tried to pull him away, he screamed like a lunatic, fighting them and trying to bite. Chuqui retrieved a section of hardwood sapling from one of the broken spears, stepped up behind him, and smacked Ras a good one at the base of his skull

— 35 —

Kirk was a little crazy, but he was no fool. He owned several buildings in Melbourne, Florida, which brought him a considerable income, and he lived in Dominica, jungle paradise, with six acres of land and four houses. All in spite of never having had a real job in his charmed life. Nobody had to tell Kirk which way the wind was blowing. He could see for himself that his best friend since they were in grade school was now one seriously fucked-up dude. He glanced sideways at his wife Rita, who confirmed with a raised eyebrow that she saw it too.

Erasmus Taft, in fact, looked like shit. His long, thick brown hair, healthy a few weeks before, was now receding at a shocking rate from a forehead that seemed far too large. Had Ras’ head ever been that big? His teeth so unnaturally long? His gnarled feet were jammed into a pair of the flat leather sandals that rich tourists could buy at the waterfront market in Roseau on the weekends, but even though they must have been size-twelves they still looked too small. Kirk could wear the size-ten boots Ras had left for Salbado the day of the hurricane; he’d almost taken them for himself, but Kirk was too honest for that.

Ras’ fingernails were an ugly purple, long and jagged. His already light blue eyes seemed to be turning almost white. His skin was peeling, as if he’d gotten too much sun, but Kirk had seen this man burned by the sun for twenty years in their youth, and he had never peeled like this. Kirk knew he was not hallucinating; he always knew perfectly well when he was. Something was way wrong with his bud. And he was asking questions, aggressively asking really weird questions, like he was some kind of cop or something. Kirk knew Ras had worked for the black helicopter types during the war, but that was a part of his life Ras had never revealed to his friend. Having spent his entire life selling weed, Kirk had a serious hard-on for law enforcement or anything remotely like it, and Ras knew that perfectly well.

“How did you know the vampires were at Vena’s?” he asked again. It might have been the tenth time, and Kirk was getting pretty pissed off at his friend’s badgering. “I didn’t know a fucking thing, man. You know God-damned well I make all that shit up.” Ras took a long toke from a huge joint, their third. He had hoped to get good and stoned with his old buddy and maybe things would get back to normal. Instead they got worse – more weird, and more creepy.

“What the hell happened to you?” Kirk asked. His friend wore a grimy sling on his right arm, but he didn’t look like he really needed it. Ras waved his hand in dismissal. “I’ve been sick. Got some pills for it, though; I’ll be good as new in no time.” Bullshit, thought Kirk, but said nothing. Ras fumbled with the slinged arm and drew out a bottle of capsules, four of which he slugged down with a pull on the little green bottle of Kubuli beer. Kirk hated pills. Despite putting whatever he damn pleased in his body for half a century, in some twisted way he disdained anything some doctor said he should put in his body. For Kirk, there was nothing inconsistent about this.

It was scary, those white eyes staring at him, and Kirk took another toke on his joint. He handed it to Ras, who sucked on it longer than Kirk would have thought was humanly possible, and never, as he gushed out a cloud of blue smoke, gave out a single cough. Something was definitely not right. Weed made you cough, God damn it. If Kirk knew anything, then that was true. Ras had never been one with strong lungs either; Kirk knew he’d had asthma as a child, and that he was allergic to milk. Yet since he had returned the night before, Kirk had watched him guzzle every drop of milk in the house; in all four houses in fact. And he’d eaten a whole chicken, the rice Rita had made for the dogs, an entire head of lettuce, the last of the carrots, and the leftover spaghetti. And beets! Damn! One more thing Kirk knew was, Ras hated beets like cancer. That in itself would have told Ras’ friend that bad-mojo shit was going down.

For his part, Ras was beginning to relax. A little. He looked hard at both of his friends. They seemed to be okay. Their hair was fine, or no stranger than standard in Kirk’s case, shaved on one side and long on the other. Their eyes weren’t washing out, their fingernails looked normal. The jungle and mountains surrounded their bamboo house, the house which would last maybe fifty or even a hundred years, because the bamboo of the walls, and the roseau cane on the roof, and the heavier timbers of the teak tree had all been cut on the right day of the right moon. They would not rot with the endless rains, and the ants and termites and worms and beetles would not eat them up. Purple-green caco pods the size of acorn squash hung from the chocolate trees, and the calabashes swayed in the wind like green basketballs from giant limbs that hung over the river.

Sitting on their front porch, enjoying the bubbling and splashing of the branch of the Layou River, smoking joints, and drinking Kubulis, Ras could imagine for minutes at a time that all the vileness had not happened. No murders, no zombies, no vampires. He almost laughed. He laughed a lot now. No more really embarrassing relatives! Goodness, glad we got that out of the way. But, no such luck.

Ras knew he was infected. He’d been taking the pills since the raid at Vena’s. His greatest fear was that he would return to find Kirk and Rita infected as well, only much further on their way to becoming zombs. That did not seem to be the case, and he was greatly relieved. His horrible, disloyal suspicion of his friend had proven false and he was ashamed he had ever thought it. He was also relieved because he would not, as he had planned, have to sequester them for an indefinite period while he force-fed them antibiotics. He hadn’t been looking forward to that.

Darius had said the pills would cure it if taken soon enough. He’d started the morning after the raid. He’d been injured by the zomb in the dasheen field, to begin with, but more importantly, Charlie had raked him in their duel to the death and he was terrified that somehow the direct contact with the real vampire would doom him to the same fate. Mattias Goodwill had started at the same time, and he seemed to be okay. He’d come to see Ras in the cave three days after the raid. Chuqui, Primm, and the black giant had left him and Anibal there to recuperate. Anibal was still laid up with shrapnel wounds in his legs and his fat ass. At least he’d had the sense to turn away, Ras had thought. They had also left Anibal there to see if Ras would kill him. Maraque had survived his own fatal bungle with the last hand grenade, even though three others of their band had not. What the sadly reduced membership of the Dominica Vampire Hunters did not know was whether he would survive Ras’ fury. They would understand if Ras killed him; he deserved it. But killing him would just make it harder for Ras to command the respect of the other vampire hunters left on the island; and, they assured Ras before they left, there were several more hunters he had yet to meet. Besides, Mattias liked the hairy pirate, and would take it very hard if he were killed.

But Mattias found Ras boiling some of Mamma Geraldine’s tea for Maraque. Mattias was wearing sunglasses, even in the dim cave. Ras dipped tea into battered blue enamelware coffee cups for them all and poured in heavy doses of good, dark St. John’s Island rum. After making sure Anibal could drink his tea without help, he lit up a famous hoober of Salbado’s killer weed and passed it around. They each partook in long tokes, coughing and snorting as only inveterate pot smokers can; no one needed to comment. Mattias Goodwill popped open a pill bottle and downed four white capsules with his tea. Ras put out his hand to take the man’s huge black arm like a true friend.

“Make sure you keep taking those pills, my man; Darius promised me that they work. Give it time.” He hesitated. “Do you know…I mean, will my teeth…?” He couldn’t go on. Mattias took off his sunglasses. His eyes had changed from the deep brown of almost every black man on Earth to a light tan. On a white man they would have been unusual; on Mattias they looked frightful. Anibal looked on with compassion. He had been unable to comfort his American friend about his appearance; Maraque had not been injured in any way that could have infected him, but he knew Ras had, for sure. It hurt his heart, but the man he considered the new leader of the zombie hunters was beginning to look an awful lot like a zombie himself. Mattias was different, Anibal considered. His head could hardly have gotten any larger, his arms longer, or his teeth bigger. He was naturally damn near as big as the vampire Charlie had been before they had killed him, or, he corrected himself, started him on his way to being dead someday, or whatever. Only his bleached-out eyes testified that Mattias, too, had been exposed to the vampire bacteria.

It was all too complicated for Anibal, who was the first to admit he wasn’t the coldest beer in the six-pack. All he knew was one thing: he would follow Ras Tafari anywhere. The hard-assed American Rasta, as they had come to call him, had nursed him, carefully picking the fragments of metal from his butt and legs while he cried like a girl. Ras had cleaned him when he shit himself when passed out from the dope and the rum and the pain, which Anibal was sure had happened three or four times. When he woke up scared and disoriented, Ras had hugged him and rocked him like a baby. And he had done it all with a broken arm! Ras had never said a word against him, never called him on his cowardice in the cave, never once joked at his expense, fragged in the ass and all. When Anibal pressed him later as to why he had done all this for a screw-up like himself, Ras had only replied that it was a debt he owed, one he could never repay. Now, Anibal Maraque had a debt of his own, and by God, he paid his debts.

Mattias had a grave face for Ras. His high melodious voice, so odd compared to his great body, was somehow comforting when giving bad news. “I am afraid you can expect no reversal of de effects of de vampire virus, now de vampire is dead, like in de American movies,” he intoned sadly. “Nor wit’ de pills; dey will stop it, but not undo it. As far as I can tell you, dese changes are permanent.” Ras was stunned. Wasn’t that a line from an American rock tune? “These changes are permanent.” It was then that Ras knew he could never go home. Not like this. He was a freak.

The day after he visited Kirk and Rita, Chuqui and Mattias came to the cave with Uncle Charlie. He was wrapped in a piece of tarpaulin they had picked up on the beach. Dead, or something like it, he was no bigger than Ras’ skinny-assed little uncle had ever been, and he stank up the place like the three-day-old carcass of a water buffalo. “Phwee-oh!” Anibal hollered. “Get him out!” Ras literally cowered at the back of the cave until he gathered the courage to come forward and face his enemy. The hair stood out from the back of his neck. Charlie was squished up, waxy, nasty, covered with rotting flesh, bloody organs, and crawling with maggots. He smelled like a skunk that had been “ate by a wolf and shit off a cliff,” as Charlie himself used to say.

“How’d he get so small? I mean, he was fucking huge…” Chuqui began to chatter to Mattias, and it seemed to Ras as if he was beginning to understand some of the Kwéyòl they spoke. He figured he might as well learn some Kwéyòl, as well as some Kalinago; Salbado had said it. “I don’ see you leavin’ here anytime soon.” At this point, looking as he did like something out of a grade-B horror flick, he didn’t see it either. Best to learn how to get along where he was. Mattias was doing his best to translate.

“He say de blood and flesh de vampire eat, it just build up inside him, make him bigger and stronger. He don’ digest it, he just…take it in, use it, to grow bigger and more powerful. I t’ink de infected heart can command it, de same way it command de zombs.” Goodwill wrinkled his impressive, shaggy brows, trying to explain. “When de wood pierce de heart, dat heart lose control of all of it, all dat nasty stuff come out, he vomit it all up. You saw it.” And Ras held up a hand, shuddering. He didn’t want to hear any more about that part.

“So, he what? He got smaller?” Mattias was nodding. “Yes, yes! He shrink up, as all dat mess come out. I am t’inking you don’t see it all…” Thank God for that, Ras thought, and Mattias, looking embarrassed, said, “Chuqui want you to know he be sorry for hitting you. He believe at de time it was de right t’ing to do.” Ras smiled, and he would have taken the Carib’s hand, except that he knew it would have made the murderous, cannibalistic little vampire killer nervous. Chuqui let his own teeth show, those sharpened fangs so like those of the boy painted on the wall of the Hummingbird Hotel. So like those of a vampire. It seemed that the unnatural eaters of men had been bested, more than once, by the natural ones. “Chuqui, my good friend, it was the right thing to do. It most certainly was.” The little Carib’s face lit up; Ras knew for a fact he understood every word.

On Friday night Ras left Anibal alone, knowing the engineers at the mining site would be off for the weekend. He strolled down the concrete ditch, ducking when cars went by, feeling damn good. He threw off the sling; after just days, his broken arm was fine. He was tall, strong, vibrant, and hungry as a starved horse. He thought about sushi in Miami with his sister, and his mouth gushed like one of the innumerable waterfalls on the island. He thought about finding a goat and biting right into its throat, and it made him nearly frantic. He could see better than ever in the dark. As he strode easily through the half-flooded ditch, a fat lizard ran along the edge and he snatched it up, bit off its head and sucked out the blood and organs. It barely made a dent in his ravening hunger.

At the point they were tearing down the coastline to build houses elsewhere on the island, he broke into a machine shop. He searched for twenty minutes before finding materials suitable for his project: stainless steel sheet metal three-sixteenths of an inch thick. He didn’t know how to run the stamping machines so he set up an electric saw to cut a strip of stainless sheet three inches wide and about 40 inches long. The banding mechanism, designed to crimp a steel clamp around two layers of steel strip, was a heavy item but there was nothing for it; he had to steal it. Otherwise, he would have to drag Uncle Charlie here, and that would never do. He grabbed a worker’s sling bag, threw in a few items, and set the now-curved strip of steel on his shoulder. He hefted the crimper and, surprised at how light it felt, set off back down the concrete ditch.

Back at the cave Ras unrolled the scrap of tarp they’d wrapped Charlie in, trying to contain the stench. It hadn’t helped. Trying to escape that smell, Maraque, his legs and ass still aching from the shrapnel, had shuffled to the little outer hollow in the cliff, which presented its false face to the coastal highway. Besides, Ras figured sympathetically, being that close to the fucking thing must have given Anibal the creeps.

In Charlie’s back was what appeared to be a minor wound from a ridiculously tiny rod of wood, the remains of the arrow, protruding from it about half an inch. He noticed that the barrier formed by the ribs was not quite so solid as the front of the body. It was still a wonder Chuqui had been able to hit the tiny area that would not only allow the arrow to penetrate but to strike the heart as well. Thank God, the little fucker was good. No wonder he’d killed three vampires already. Looked like this one made four.

He took one of Darius’ sharpened stakes and placed the point right next to the arrow. Using a stone, he pounded the stake in alongside the shaft, just to make sure the bastard was dead and would stay that way. It seemed every drop of moisture had left Charlie along with the blood, which made it a bad job; it was like beating a dull spike through beef jerky a foot thick. He shook his head in the dimness of the cave, as he heard cars echo hollowly past on the road. This whole thing about not staying dead once you’d been killed fair and square still pissed him off more than he could say. It offended his sense of order.

Finally, the stake was in place. Ras dug in the sling bag he’d brought from the shop, bringing out a hacksaw with which he cut the stumps of both the stake and the arrow as near flush with the corpse’s back as he could. He then retrieved from the bag a pair of heavy leather gloves and went to get Anibal. As the injured man slowly made his way into the cave, Ras explained what he wanted to do.

“I put a buckle on one end of the band, so we can slide the other end through it and wrap it around the stake like a belt. That’ll make it awful hard for some fool to pull that stake out.” He had also drilled a hole in the far end of the band of steel. He used the gloves because the edges of the stainless steel were newly cut and razor sharp. Once he had the band around Charlie’s chest, he told Anibal to slide the other end through the buckle. Charlie was against a wall of the cavern on his back, and a small ridge of rock ran along the floor maybe two feet out. Ras pulled the heavy crimping tool out of the bag, then two solid clamp rings, and finally a three-foot length of reinforcement bar.

He slipped the bar through the hole on the free end of the steel band, offset a little from the end they would bend double, and then placed the bottom of the bar behind the little hump of stone. Ras sat with his feet toward Charlie, hard against his shriveled right bicep. He positioned Anibal on the other side of the bar, to his right, with his feet against Charlie’s right hip. Both men grasped the bar, with the steel band about half-way up its length and levered the bar back against the ridge of stone. The band tightened around Charlie’s chest like a man tightening his belt.

While Anibal held the tension on the band, Ras took the stone he’d used to pound in the stake and beat at the band just past the buckle, forcing it double so he could clamp it securely. At first the hardened steel resisted his efforts, bouncing with his blows, so he got a bigger rock. He had to raise a stone the size of a bowling ball overhead to bend the metal double, but by brute force and persistence he finally beat it into submission. Wretched, stinking dust and odd bits and particles sloughed off of the corpse, adding to the gagging miasma surrounding the vampire. Banging away, sweating in the humid air of the cave, he also cursed himself. Stupid son-of-a-bitch, he thought. Should have been smart enough to steal a hammer, too.

Maraque was pouring sweat too; it was no small exertion to maintain the tension on the band. Ras slid one of the clamping rings around the doubled steel bands, then placed the crimping tool over the ring. Turning the bar on the tool, he caused the jaws of the mechanism to press the edges of the split clamp ring tight against the band. He used the smaller stone to hammer at that, too, pounding the handle farther around its course, forcing the clamp tighter and tighter. When he was satisfied with it, he took the second and tightened it, just as firmly, right next to the first. Only when he was positive he’d secured the band holding the stakes did he allow his companion to release the pressure on the bar. Ras took the hacksaw and trimmed off the excess on the curled end of the steel band. He then scooped most of the nasty dust and bits of dried organs onto the scrap of tarp, poured some cheap Guadelupe rum over it, and lit it with a splinter from the fire. It reeked all the more, but as it burned brightly Anibal nodded in approval.

Anibal Maraque was exhausted, aching and sweating from the exertion, but he didn’t mind. He was a vampire hunter. No sacrifice was too much. He’d seen Darius, who he’d thought of as just lower than Jesus Himself, give his life to rid their island of this curse. Anibal thought of these things in relatively simple terms; he was a simple man. He loved his country, his island. Yes, his “Uncle” Astaphan was probably his real father, but while this uncomfortable likelihood had dogged his life, he was also thereby afforded such benefits as the poor island had to offer its limited elite. He felt he owed his countrymen for the life he had, when so many of them had so little. He’d really been quite seriously injured when the last hand grenade had exploded, although he had tried to hide the extent of his wounds from his new friend. He had thought the American wouldn’t care, considering Anibal’s stupidity – cowardice, call it what it was – had cost the lives of three of their men. But it had stopped the vampire, at least long enough for Chuqui to get the drop on it. Maraque shivered when he thought of the sharp-toothed Indian. In spite of all he’d seen, all the horror he’d witnessed, that little fucker still gave him the creeps. Oh yeah, you got a vampire? Well, I got a grinning little cannibal who kills vampires, how ’bout dat?

Anibal was pretty sure the American had known precisely how badly he had been hurt, and Ras hadn’t exactly walked away either. Yet he’d cared for him, in spite of the deaths. Now Ras helped him out to the little fire at the entrance to their cave, where they both took a long pull from the St. John’s Island bottle. Ras lit up another fat joint from Salbado’s crop. It was drier now and burned better. It helped to cover the stench from the cadaver of the vampire. After a while, they didn’t care about the stench anyway.

— 36 —

Saturday around noon, Ras pawed through his clothes and pulled out the best he could find, kind of a negative assessment: not too wrinkled, not too filthy, not too moldy. Today he had to go into Roseau and arrange for a coffin for Charlie to go home. He was shocked that he had to search for his wallet, his money, his credit cards. He hadn’t needed any of these things in so long they were like a reminder of another life. The keys! Where were his car keys?

His shirt didn’t fit, his chest was too big. And after all that time wasted at the gym, he thought sourly. Just get yourself bit by a zombie, get that masculine vigor back in no time! It seemed, at least, that the terrifying changes in his body had stopped, although the consensus was, there was no going back. He heard Hattie McDaniel in Gone with The Wind saying, “You done had a baby, Miss Scarlett, and you ain’t never going to be no eighteen and a half inches again….” And he, Ras Taft, or Tafari, or whatever, had no chance of getting his old tennies on the misshapen gunboats he now found at the ends of his too-long legs. He trotted barefoot along the concrete ditch in the rain to find his rental car up by the rock-mining site.

In town he tried to hide the car on a side street, having long since overstayed his rental, but he needn’t have worried. A white tourist in a rental car, even an odd-looking white tourist in a rather battered rental car, was waved right past the cops at the bridge into town. They were looking for unlicensed taxis, who mostly stayed up in the mountains and always took a chance when they came downso into the capital. That and the occasional weed runner who hadn’t paid his dues; these generally faced a severe beating and a few nights in jail to hurt without rum, weed, or company. The government of the island had tried to squeeze the cruise lines a little too much, with the result that the first ship in five years was in the port. The locals were orgasmic. White people in general could do no wrong.

The Saturday Market was in full swing all along and behind the waterfront. After crossing over the divided bridge into town, Ras passed the food vendors and the old jail, which was now an arcade-like structure with specialty shops, which constituted the north end of the waterfront. He was headed for the clothing booths, farther south by Government House and the duty-free area that announced the start of where the rich folks lived in Dominica, such as they were. He parked and wandered among the tables and brightly-colored awnings. He was alarmed at how often he saw the local women’s dark eyes shoot open, glaring white at the sight of him. Many of them recognized him for what he was. Too many. He bought a shirt from one such wide-eyed woman, who took his money and gave him change without touching him or saying a word. It was a horrid red tropical print, size triple-x and still tight on his shoulders.

The largest sandals he could find were what the islanders called “thirty-fives,” which were three hundred fifty millimeters, or about size fourteens. They actually almost fit. The little stick of a black man who sold the sandals seemed to recognize his condition too, but he leaned in close and asked. “You have de troubles?” The old man’s tight white curls clung close to his head, merging imperceptibly with his sideburns and beard, all one patch of hair, all the same length. Ras just nodded. Being secretive seemed foolish. Nobody admitted anything anyway, right? The old man rocked knowingly. “You got de pills?” Even his nose hairs were white. Ras nodded again. “Good, good. You know Darius?” Ras nodded a third time, a little nervous now. “How he do?” Ras hesitated, perhaps too long. The sandal man was very still for a time, looking out across the water. Then he seemed to wake up. “So, it like dat.” Ras didn’t know what else to do, so he just nodded again. “Okay okay, you give me fifteen dollars EC for dese sandals, and you come back in one week. You give me dese sandals back, and I have some, dey fit you good. Then you give me thirty-five dollars EC and you take de new sandals. And,” he plucked at the awful print shirt, “I get my daughter, she make you clothes dat fit too. You gon’ need dem.” Ras handed over the fifteen EC, which amounted to five dollars in US currency. He offered a fist to bump and the old man responded, and when Ras tapped the fist to his chest, the old man nodded knowingly. “Dey said you were a good one.” “Thank you. I hope they were right. Did you know Darius well?”

“Some,” the old man allowed. “Darius was on a mission. He’d strayed from de way, and it cost him. His family, his whole flock, lost. He was always trying to make dat up, to pay off dat debt. I’m t’inking he was a better man dan he t’ought he was.” Ras nodded one last time. “I’m t’inking dat myself, my friend. See you in a week.”

— 37 —

Saintjeust and Sons was a reputable funeral home, serving Dominica’s capital for over eighty years. Jean-Franc Saintjeust the Third leaned back behind his polished desk in his impeccable grey suit, his long skinny legs crossed, his fingertips together in the age-old pose of a businessman who doesn’t like what he is hearing. Index fingers to his lips, he gazed over those steepled fingers at the dirty American in the ragged shorts and the truly execrable island print shirt. He couldn’t decide if the man was a drug addict or what, but there was something horribly wrong with him, of that Jean-Franc was certain. And the odor of the man! The Americans he’d known were almost fanatically clean, nothing like this barbarian. In the name of God, the stench was enough to drive him from his own air-conditioned office.

Only. Only this American had money. A lot of money, apparently. His identification seemed to be in order, and a call to a major US bank had been answered with assurances that whatever expenses Mr. Taft might see fit to incur would indeed be paid in full. And that was only one of the banks on the list the awful man had given him; Jean-Franc had not deemed it necessary to call another. This odiferous American wanted to spend an inordinate amount of that money– a truly extraordinary amount, in fact. He wanted a top-of-the-line coffin for his uncle, and more than that, he wanted Saintjeust and Sons to transport this coffin to the Port of Miami, Florida, in the United States. This would profit Saintjeust and Sons handsomely, in fact astonishingly. There was just one small problem. The revolting American wanted to prepare the body and seal the coffin himself. It was unheard of. Then again, judging by the disgusting smell coming from this foreign ruffian, a civilized man might easily believe he did it all the time. Jean-Franc had prepared corpses for a living for thirty years and had never smelled like that. For the love of God, the corpses had never smelled like that.

“Tell me again, please,” Jean-Franc asked, his ebony forehead creased with curiosity, “why you wish to put the body in the coffin yourself?” The American tensed, and for just an instant the funeral director felt a creeping chill behind his neck. Clearly, this frightening, dirty, ugly man did not like to be questioned. “I told you before, my uncle has been dead for…some time. He was found in a cave, apparently the victim of a drunken fall. His body is in an advanced state of decay, and I wish to deal with the remains personally. To be certain the proper respect is shown according to our, ah, religious beliefs. I assure you that I am willing to pay for the consideration.” Mr. Saintjeust hesitated, reading from the papers in front of him. This filthy fool could not possibly be meaning to smuggle anything from Dominica into the United States. Dominica produced mostly mediocre marijuana and, like all other goods, she had to import all of her more serious drugs. Criminals smuggled things in, not out.

“There are other considerations, Mr. um, Taft. Shipping regulations, Customs, and so forth. I’m not sure they will be happy with a sealed coffin that has not been inspected by a Licensed Funeral Director, you understand.” Ras understood all right. The slick bastard meant it would cost more. “Again, I will be happy to pay for that inspection, and any other…fees, for paperwork, that sort of thing…I’m sure you understand. And if you could personally handle all those arrangements for me, with the other departments and so on, I would be most grateful.” Jean-Franc Saintjeust saw doors opening in a hallway in his mind, and behind each of these doors was a way to make more money. This awful person was handing Saintjeust and Sons a blank check, and he could write that check, by God. He felt a surge of elation. He rose and, despite his revulsion, offered the ghastly white man his hand.

— 38 —

Samantha Taft was the chief medical examiner at Jackson Memorial Hospital, one street north of the famous Bascomb-Palmer Eye Institute, and she took her responsibilities very seriously. She was only the second woman ever to have this job; she fervently hoped to groom one of her assistant physicians, Dr. Tian Ngu Nguyen, to become the third when she went on to teach at the University of Miami’s excellent medical school. Her father had attended UM on the GI Bill, earning a degree in both chemical and mechanical engineering. Go ’Canes.

[photo: no caption, but a view of a hospital, presumably, with a long walk or roadway going up from a bit right of center, diagonally to the center of the photo]

Speaking of hurricanes, she was about to leave on a trip over to Punta Gorda, where Hurricane Charlie had recently landed and proceeded to devastate his way across half of central Florida. There she would treat displaced residents of destroyed mobile-home parks with strokes or heart attacks or COPD or dementia. She would also treat the injured emergency workers sent to rescue the denizens of those mobile-home parks, with cuts, electrocutions, abrasions, and exhaustion. It helped to keep her skills sharp by treating the odd patient who had not, technically, gone beyond the need of medical intervention. Personally, she thought that people who chose to live in what amounted to tinfoil shacks on wheels in the most hurricane-ravaged stretch of the planet were idiots, but it wasn’t their fault. She was personally rather pissed at President George Bush right now; how dare he not sign the Kyoto Accords? The severe weather was definitely from global warming. It was really Bush’s fault these hurricanes were getting worse. Another one was already forming out in the Atlantic, Francesca, something like that. You could never tell when they would sneak in some Hispanic name. Not that she minded; this was Miami in the twenty-first century, after all. Samantha spoke passable Espanol; it was solo cortez. Her courtesy did not, however, extend to idiots, whether they lived in tinfoil shacks or the White House.

Her phone was tinkling in her pocket again, but she ignored it. Fuck ’em, she thought; none of her patients were alive, after all. It couldn’t be an emergency, now could it? Right this minute she was finishing the excellent clam chowder the Au Bon Pain served for lunch on the ground floor mezzanine by the eye hospital, properly known as Anne Bates Leach Eye Institute. She was scooping it up with the remains of the Cubano Pork Wrap, which wasn’t bad at all either. She was considering Sawat, the other member of her team, who was also an outstanding forensic examiner. Between herself the English Rose, Dr. al-Shibh the Pakistani, and Tian the Viet, she humorously called her team “the foreigners at the coroner’s.” She was maybe even a little in love with the dark and handsome Dr. Sawat al-Shibh, but he just wasn’t as relentlessly thorough as he ought to be. As Tian was. As she was. If there had been no one better available, and there were damn few better anywhere, he would have the job in a heartbeat. But there was someone better. She was thinking about how any chances she might have had with Sawat would vanish like a lover’s sigh when he found out she was recommending Tian for the top spot instead of him. And, she was looking at a letter.

It was from her crazy brother, who’d gone off to some island down by South America to look for Uncle Charlie. It had arrived with the casket of said absconded scoundrel of an uncle, or so the shipping labels claimed. She’d have told Ras he was finally, certifiably insane even going down there if Mom hadn’t put him up to it. She would never say anything to slight her mother. Not when Mom had told her that her lowlife shitbag of a husband was a lowlife shitbag, and that was hard. Not even when Mom’d turned out to be right, and that was even harder.

This letter, now. It made her nervous. Very nervous. The writing on the envelope looked like Ras’, but it was too large, scrawling, like he was drunk, stoned, high as a Georgia pine. She’d known him to be all of those, even been there with him in the old days, but she’d never seen his handwriting suffer. It was always flawless. If he was that wasted, he would be partying, not writing letters. Finally, she opened it with her short, clean, businesslike fingernail. Her forensic training told her the ghost of a gum line outside the flap indicated someone had steamed it open and resealed it, like in an old mystery novel.

Ras, it was now frighteningly clear, had indeed lost whatever was left of his over-cooked mind. His handwriting wavered like a drunk driver on a dark road. He went on about Uncle Charlie and this awful disease, and how she had to clear the coffin for burial without looking inside or disturbing it in any way. This was pissing her off, as her own dear brother Erasmus would have said, “like a buzzard as has been pissed on.” He had to know she couldn’t do that, God damn it! That would require a clearance from Customs. Since 9/11, Christ Himself could be shipping Saint James and the Holy Grail and He wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a Customs clearance. It wasn’t until she had read the entire two pages of Ras’ pleadings, not to say ravings, that she see that the casket was buried right away with no inspection, that she noticed the third page in the envelope. It had stuck inside, separate from the letter itself. The first thing she noticed was the Customs seal at the bottom, over the signature of someone undoubtedly very important. Ras the Retired Spook, it seemed, still had some friends in the system.

Dr. Tian Ngu Nguyen had already put in one call to her boss, Dr. Samantha Taft. Although she knew how much Dr. Taft hated being bothered on her lunch, she was about to put in another. The reek of burned pneumatic saw blades and fried cutting oil stung her nose from the number-three exam room, where Dr. Sawat al-Shibh seemed to have become frantically obsessed with opening this freighted-in and heavily sealed coffin. He’d been acting squirrelly lately in any case, and this casket, apparently carrying a relative of Samantha’s, had set him off in a way she had never seen before. Tian had witnessed other Middle-Eastern men getting all high-and-mighty male superior before, but never him.

Tian had escaped from Vietnam in 1978 as a child of six when both her parents were killed by the government spies. Her uncle had carried her out in his suitcase, waving a forged passport. The men on the airplane had thrown her in with the other luggage. She couldn’t breathe as they threw the rest of the bags on top of her, her uncle’s shouted protests becoming muffled as she was buried in the hold. It was a twelve-hour flight, during which she nearly froze to death. Not a hell of a lot ever scared her now. Tian had long since admitted to herself she was hopelessly in love with Dr al-Shibh, but something was terribly wrong with him right now and it was scaring her. Badly.

Sawat was sawing at another of the obstinate stainless steel fasteners that lined the edge of the casket like guards on the wall of a fort. She’d never seen anything like that, and she wondered why someone would go to so much trouble to seal a coffin. The answers made her stomach fall to her feet. Some kind of plague? The oil he poured on the cuts smoked and stank in the small examination room. The air hose for the saw hung down from the ceiling, and above the doctor on a stainless steel rack were slung even more of what Tian liked to call “weapons of mass destruction.” At least she could find hers.

Sawat’s eyes were wide and white. The pneumatic saw, which was usually used on ordinary flesh and bone, was not really up to this job, and with an Urdu curse, the normally mild and collected Dr. al-Shibh threw down another ruined blade. Tian Ngu Nguyen punched Samantha’s cell phone again. Her brows ground down into valleys of worry and concern. She hugged herself with her left arm, her right to her ear. She whispered into the phone, to herself, her boss, the world. “Come on, come on, come on.”

— 39 —

Fucking bitch, reflected Dr. Sawat al-Shibh. Just like a woman. She had flaunted herself before him, then stuck the knife in his back. He leaned on the screeching saw again. Tiny flecks of sharp steel slewed off with the dark cutting oil, which ran down the side of the casket like bitter honey. The hospital grapevine had told him the news before he’d even been notified of the “meeting” tomorrow. Sawat al-Shibh believed himself to be Muslim only by birth, but the culture dies hard in the man. She was the Whore, he told himself, the Temptress. He had attempted to glorify himself and as a result Allah had seen fit to send her to torment him. He had no one to blame but himself. She had offered the two things he desired most, herself and the position of Chief Medical Examiner, and then she had snatched them away without a word. If she cared for him, why had she not told him herself? In private, where he might have salvaged some particle of pride? But no, she had written it in a report. A report, it seemed, to which just about anyone in the hospital had access.

Right this minute, Dr. Sawat ibn Saran ibn Falah al-Shibh, graduate cum laude of the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine, and until today a respected member of the Jackson Memorial Miami Metro Hospital staff, was the subject of raw gossip by cooks, janitors, and aides. There was no doubt in his mind whatsoever. Gum-chewing teenagers swabbing out soiled bedpans would discuss how he must have failed to satisfy her. Oh, she had timed her deceptions well. Just the other night at the sushi place (the friendly one up in Surfside with an excess of quiet lesbian couples, not the loud neon joint on South Beach), she had hinted that she might be ready for their relationship to be, well, more than it had been. Which had not been much.

She was American, she was a Christian, and she was divorced. He thought his mother was going to have a stroke when he mentioned her as a possible wife. She berated him like a stupid child – who could be a worse choice? She had not, she made it painfully clear, slaved for years for him to throw his life away with this white infidel, a used woman after all, and if she had been married why then did she have no children? Was she barren? Was that why her first husband had put her away? Was his mother to be sentenced to a life without grandchildren? Even then, while his mother wailed, still he was determined. If she would have him he would do anything, break with his family, even break with Islam, to possess her.

But as it turned out, he thought belligerently, he hadn’t been “thorough” enough. Not thorough enough in Examination; not thorough enough in Research. She had said it twice, as if to see that the hospital board could not misunderstand or fail to fully grasp his limitations as a medical examiner. His mouth hung open, a line of drool leaking from the corner as one more fastener fell, clanging, to the floor. The army of aides, the janitors, and the gas-supply technicians, the maids who mopped the halls, the pest-control techs, and the security guys – oh, the security guys, who knew everything – they all infested the bowels of the monstrous hospital complex like parasitic worms. And all of them, all, would now be joking about how he must not have been “thorough” enough in fucking her. He had not, in fact, fucked her at all. He hadn’t gotten anywhere near her. The bitch had somehow ensnared him without giving up anything. He had been prepared to tell his mother that she was virtuous, not the common, loose American woman. His mother. Well, he resolved, he would now show Doctor Samantha Taft just how thorough he could be.

Oh yes. The grapevine had told him the contents of the letter from her brother as well. Sawat had met this degenerate, this psychotic, murderous, addicted sibling of hers at the sushi bar, and if there was a single cold-hearted, lowlife drug-smuggling human serpent left on Earth, he was sure her brother was that man. The ravaged corpses of a multitude of drug victims poured through his exam rooms to be butchered, and he hated smugglers and dealers with a righteous passion. Oh yes. Sawat would be extremely, obsessively thorough this time. He would get this God-cursed armored casket open before she could interfere, and he would find the drugs, and he would fuck that man up. For no other reason than that he was the brother of the most rotten, corrupt, foul woman in America, a country he now understood to be as filled with rotten, corrupt, foul women as a corpse is filled with maggots.

Tian was almost frantic now. Sawat had the coffin open. It smelled like the paddies in her home country when dead bodies had been thrown in the shallow water just days before. Yet the shriveled corpse inside looked like it had been dead a hundred years. She knew she should run, call security, but she feared what would happen to Sawat. He would rage at the men in blue jumpsuits, tell them he was the assistant M.E., what the hell were they thinking? He would expect them to cower like dogs. But she knew they would take him into custody, and there would be an inquiry, and he might well lose his position, even his license. So she just stared through the window. The truth was she was somehow entranced by the withered remains of the supposed uncle of Samantha and her brother Erasmus, a man she had never met. She knew the man she loved was obsessed with Samantha Taft, and who could blame him? She was beautiful, intelligent, and…American. He had rarely given the oriental assistant M.E. a second glance. She had tried, they’d been on a few dates, but Tian had never been to the cozy little sushi place up in Surfside, let alone the loud neon one on South Beach. The only one Sawat had taken her to, just the once, was a storefront, just up Biscayne Boulevard, and in her considered, Vietnamese opinion, it was McSushi at best. Definitely number-three fish. It was a Thai place, like most of the sushi bars that had sprung up all over. She preferred Japanese.

Dr. al Shibh dragged the pathetic, wrinkled corpse out from the casket and dropped it carelessly at his feet. Tian gasped, horrified by this lack of respect. By the sound, he might have thrown down a rotten piece of log. Yet she couldn’t take her eyes from the body. What was it about this dead man that drew her eye? Another odd thing was the steel band around the cadaver’s chest, but now was no time for curiosities. Sawat was ripping at the white silk lining of the coffin, taking a scalpel to the puffy pillows sown into the bottom, top and sides. Nothing came out but yellowish stuffing. Tian recognized it as punk from the Kapok tree, which for hundreds of years had been used to fill, among other things, coffins and life preservers. Wherever this casket came from, they still did things the old way.

Sawat became more and more agitated when he did not find whatever he was looking for. He slashed at the stuffing, raging and cursing, finally stabbing the bent scalpel repeatedly into the heavy wood of the coffin itself. She was amazed. It wasn’t easy to bend a scalpel. His hand was bleeding from cuts he’d gotten as his hand slipped down the slim handle; scalpels were not made for stabbing. Tears were running down Tian’s lovely oriental face. If she called security now, Sawat would undoubtedly be arrested, maybe even detained in the psychiatric wing under the Baker Act. She couldn’t do that to him, it would destroy his career. He was stretched across the foot of the casket, his face buried in the shredded lining. His hand still clutching the bloody scalpel, he sobbed into the puffy material like a lost child. That was a shock in itself – their patients didn’t bleed. She clenched her hands before her as if in prayer, took a deep breath, and stepped purposefully into examination room number three.

“Dr. al-Shibh, we have to get this subject off the floor this instant.” He turned on her like a brown-eyed hawk, his noble nose above the magnificent mustache, wavy black hair festooned with bits of kapok stuffing. She faltered. “Sawat, please! Look what you’ve done here! If they see this cadaver, any of this, you’ll be arrested, removed. You’ll lose your license!” She had almost let him make love to her one moonlit night when they had driven down to Flamingo, in the Everglades. She wished now that she had; if so, maybe he would listen to her now. He’d been distant ever since; here and now it was like he really didn’t even see her. It seemed his eyes took on a thoughtful gaze, and for a moment she was encouraged. Then he stood straight so quickly it made her jump back in fright. The scalpel was still in his hand and she stood in fear, but his interest was elsewhere. Story of my life, she thought fleetingly.

“The cadaver. That’s it! The clever bastard. These fucking Americans, you know. You can’t trust them.” With that he shoved the coffin off the exam table with a crash and yanked the weightless remains of the deceased into its place. Tian had to jump back out the door of the tiny exam room to avoid being hit by the heavy hardwood casket as it slammed to the floor. One of the massive fasteners al-Shibh had cut with the bone saw clattered across the floor. She had to admit someone had gone to a lot of trouble to keep anyone from opening that box.

She was crying hard now. Sawat was out of control. She didn’t know what to do. Usually, her problems involved dead people. They were never in a hurry, never impatient. There were no emergencies with corpses. They just lay there on a tray until she had the time to figure them out. She was thorough, even plodding. That was why she’d gotten Samantha’s job. She was most certainly not decisive. She didn’t call security. She didn’t even call Sam again. She just watched in growing horror through the observation window as the man she loved went completely insane. The top half of every exam room was a thick window, so medical students could watch the autopsies.

Sawat was now taking his latest sawblade to the steel strap around the dead man’s chest. It was not proving to be nearly as hard to cut as the fasteners that had sealed the coffin. In no time he had it off and it sprung, clattering, to the floor, writhing like a metal snake. He began probing at the corpse with the bent scalpel, then tossed it aside for a fresh one. Sobbing quietly, Tian still noticed that he looked around as if expecting a nurse to be there handing him whatever he needed. She watched in helpless dread while he plunged it again and again into the body, clearly searching for something like guards in some medieval movie stabbing into the haycart looking for the good guys and not finding them. She didn’t know it, but he was searching for cavities filled with white powder, bags of brown cakes, something. When he didn’t find it anything in the front of the cadaver, Sawat turned him over, only to see two wooden spikes, one a little over an inch thick and another the size of a pencil. Each had been inserted into the body (clearly post-mortem, his training told him; there was no blood) and then sawn off nearly flush with the spine. He noted that both entered the back immediately to the left of the spinal column and between the ribs, in the exact location that would assure both pierced the heart.

He didn’t know what to make of that but he was sure he had found whatever it was Erasmus Taft had been trying to hide. The man should have known better, thought the doctor. His face twisted into a sneer. No one could hide anything inside a body from such a thorough Medical Examiner – sorry, assistant Medical Examiner – as Dr. Sawat al-Shibh! He took a heavy pair of stainless steel locking pliers and fastened them to the protruding end of the larger of the two stakes. When he pulled, it was like hauling on a dummy. The spike didn’t move; rather the corpse rose with it, stiff, insubstantial, with no more resistance than an empty carpet tube. He ignored the stench, while it was gagging Tian in the hallway. He tried to hold the cadaver down but couldn’t get the stake out with one hand. He turned and shoved the battered coffin out the door, and dragged the corpse back off the table onto the floor. Tian couldn’t watch any more. She retreated into the main corridor.

She was wiping tears from her face with one hand, her cell phone held in the other like a futile charm against evil. She leaned for a moment against the institutional wallboard, with its endless rows of identical steel doors and identical steel doorframes and its exit lights outlined in red. Her shoulders shook and her eyeliner ran back to her ears as she sobbed up at the row of cloned rectangular light fixtures marching away from her in both directions. Every thirty feet or so throughout the hospital, in fact throughout every hospital in America, a steel plate was set into the wall at shoulder level with a keyhole in it. It was the kind of keyhole one might see on a vending machine, round with a central shaft. Around Tian’s neck was a coiled, springy plastic lanyard, and on that lanyard was her hospital ID card, her electronic access card, and a stout chrome key with a shaft like a little tube with teeth, which would fit into any one of those steel plates. If she put that key in that hole and turned it – or so she had been told in training a few years back – alarms would go off in the security office. The system would tell them where the emergency was, and security guards in blue uniforms would converge on that section of corridor like the cavalry in an old Western. And any prospects Dr. Sawat al-Shibh might have of continuing as a physician, anywhere, would be over. Along with her prospects of sharing a life with him.

She peeked back through the doorway to exam room number three. Sawat was shouting incoherently, and although she couldn’t see his feet behind the exam table, it appeared he was now standing on the cadaver while he heaved and strained at the object in the corpse’s back. She dropped her phone to the floor and both her hands covered her face. He was like a madman, his eyes wild, his hair spiky with sweat and still trailing bits of the golden kapok stuffing. Her hands dropped to her chest where the cards and key hung on the lanyard. As she fingered the little round key, paralyzed with indecision, Dr. Sawat was thrown backward by his own exertions as the object he’d been struggling with came free of the body. She saw it flip over his head, looking for all the world like a simple wooden stake, as he tumbled back against the rolling trays of instruments, scattering stainless steel with a crash like an earthquake in a French restaurant.

She worried he was hurt, but he was up and back at the body in an instant. He grabbed a light fixture extending from the ceiling on a telescoping arm, and played it on the hole in the corpse. He was pulling at the entry, trying to see inside it. There was nothing in the way except what looked like another tiny bit of wood that had been stuck in the back of the corpse along with the larger one. She was backing away into the corridor again, on the verge of really ringing for security this time, when Sawat pulled out the little wooden rod. Then it looked like he slipped. She couldn’t tell for sure; outside the main door and looking through the window, her view was blocked. He let out a cry of pain, but it was cut short. She rushed in to help him.

He was hurt! It looked like he had fallen across the corpse, and maybe the pliers had struck him in the face or neck. She shrieked his name in alarm. He was bleeding badly. She grabbed his hand, Shocked at the iciness in his fingers. She tried to pull him to his feet. His neck seemed to be stuck to the face of the body beneath him. She hauled at him in desperation and his body turned. That’s when she saw that the corpse had razor-pointed teeth easily three inches long, and they were buried in the throat of Dr. Sawat al-Shibh, whose body shook and plunged as the supposedly dead man, ripping his neck open farther, sucked blood and flesh into his terrible mouth. Sawat’s eyes bulged lifelessly, but the corpse’s eyes weren’t lifeless. They were wide open holes right into Hell, and staring straight at her. She turned in panic but an arm like an oak branch slammed into her and she was crushed to the putrid breast of the monster. She was held in an iron grip, her face mashed into the awful dead flesh which moved and creaked like something from the depths of a nightmare. It seemed to be filling out, flushed with fluids and life, right against her own terrified body. Her racking screams were buried in the bowels of the hospital. Morgues were almost always downstairs. No one wanted to hear the sounds from the M.E.’s office, and nobody heard Tian’s last pleas.

She could feel Sawat’s body, jammed close to hers, actually shrinking, being sucked dry by this gargoyle. She could hear his bones snapping. Somewhere in a tiny room in her psyche, her clinical mind told her that this was not really possible; nothing could suck the substance from a human body like that, while externally she was literally choking in horror. Then the dead face with the live eyes released its hold on Sawat and turned to her. The stretched, leathery lips opened impossibly wide, dripping gore. Those awful teeth, extending from those jaws, closed over her screaming mouth. Incredible pain blasted through her as it bit off the lower half of her face, her whole body jerking as the gruesome being held her tight. It crunched and swallowed her nose, jaws, and tongue, slurping at the fountain of blood, and she felt herself vomit through what was left of her face. It sucked that in too, and as she descended into darkness, her internal organs were dragged out through her own throat.

— 40 —

Samantha Taft was feeling a little guilty for not answering her phone, and when she checked and saw it had been Tian calling, she felt even worse. Now Tian wasn’t answering her own phone, and Samantha was worried. That wasn’t like Tian at all. When it came to work, Tian was a robot. She never missed a day, was always early to come and late to leave, and she always, always, always answered her phone. Her uncle was elderly, and she was constantly concerned something would happen to him, afraid she’d miss an important message. Sam had her phone to her ear as she rode the elevator down to the sub-basement where the morgue was. No one called it a morgue anymore, but Samantha could never put to rest her education by the likes of Joe Friday and Columbo. The doors opened on a short hallway with the soft fluorescent lights that faded out what little color the institutional setting owned while still requiring the hapless visitor to squint in order to see clearly. Not to mention the low, annoying buzz that could only be heard in the very quiet parts of a hospital. Like the morgue.

To her right was the auxiliary power plant and the incinerator room, which latter took the amputated limbs, the excised organs, and the luckless fetuses of equally luckless girls, churned out by a big-city hospital, and turned them into inoffensive ash, with only the tiniest contribution to climate change. To the left the hallway turned immediately left again, with the only light here showing under the door to the main examination suite, more than halfway down. They usually didn’t bother with the hallway lights. Nobody but the doctors and a few nurses used the hallway and even the cadavers came down a special elevator into the suite itself. Gone were the days when ambulance crews dragged bodies still wet from the street directly to the exam tables, often by the dozen any night, back in the cocaine cowboy days two decades before. She’d been an intern then, when these tiny rooms did not exist. The floor had been a theater then, wide open and with rows of punctured and slashed corpses jammed together in rows, blood puddling by the drains. She had seen crews with two gurneys and two bodies on each one. They would dump them, on the floor if necessary, and run back out for more. The tight little rooms that now occupied the same space had been put in as part of the major refurb done after Hurricane Andrew, partitions now providing a modicum of privacy never received by those murdered in the height of the troubles.

Her cell phone was still glued to her head when she heard a tinkling sound. Frowning, she dropped her arm to concentrate on the familiar noise, and as her phone rang again, she realized it was Tian's iPhone, ringing in response in the darkened hallway. A chill swept over her and she stepped quickly to the door, pushing it open. Exam room three was lit up, the second on the right. Something was smeared on the windows. Her hand went involuntarily to her open mouth. Her breath whooshed in. The windows were spattered with blood. She crept fearfully to the doorway and almost fell to the floor. At first, she thought that Sawat had killed both Tian and himself, in some jealous murder-suicide. Samantha’s hands, her entire body shook when she saw the condition they were in.

Sawat was crumpled up like a doll with the stuffing yanked out. What looked incongruously like real stuffing clung in wisps to his hair and mustache. His neck– hell, the whole front of his chest – was shredded, covered in blood, and somehow, horribly, empty. And poor Tian! Her face was gone. Her brain and most of the lower structures of the head were cut, or maybe bitten, so far back her spine showed through from the front. The remains of her trachea and esophagus, turned inside out like some ghastly toy balloon, extended from where her mouth should have been. Tiny bits of tissue hung on the ends, showing where her lungs, stomach, and intestines had been attached. Samantha observed that in spite of being butchered like hogs at a slaughterhouse, the corpses of her two closest friends were no longer bleeding.

She was shivering as if stranded in the Arctic, and despite her profession she puked up every bit of her clam chowder and Cubano Wrap right there, half in and half out of exam room number three. She ignored the vomit on her fingers and running down the front of her blouse as she fumbled with the set of keys on the lanyard around her neck. She gagged on a stench like the rotting carcass of a water buffalo and her eyes rolled wildly. These bodies had had no time to decay! She turned to run into the hall, to plug in the little round security key neither she nor her colleagues had ever needed to call security. Dead people were not known for becoming belligerent or uncooperative. She slammed into something so hard and unyielding she thought it must be the door, but the door was open. She fell to the floor, her nose mashed and bloody. The awful smell of rot and corruption enveloped her, and something stepped into the doorway from the darkened hall. It was big, and ugly, and that stench rolled off it like an open sewer. She kicked on the floor in horror, stuttering as she tried to scream. Then a gravelly voice from under the graveyard spoke to her. It was her Uncle Charlie.

“Well, if it isn’t little Samantha, all growed up. Don’t you remember me?” Then the monster bent and snatched her up, opening its horrible mouth so she could see all those needle-like teeth. “Give your uncle a kiss, baby.” She flailed at this nightmare from her childhood, but it was like pounding on a plank. And then it gathered her in, and she felt those teeth slice into her neck.

When it had sucked its latest victim dry, the vampire, stronger than ever, reeking of death, trudged calmly, its new substance weighting its feet, to the end of the hallway. Tiny streaks of blood and tissue followed in its wake, vainly attempting to rejoin their new and ghastly master. A set of stairs led up into the fading daylight, which would soon become night. From there the creature that had once been Charles Osbourne Dodge would exit the building and enter the Greater Miami Metropolitan Area. There, it would begin to feed as never before.

— 41 —

Ras lived in the cave now, but he didn’t like to advertise his presence as Darius had been used to do. He generally snuck his way in and out at night. It would have been too much for a white man, even a crazy white rasta, to appear as the new Old Man in the Cave. People would talk. This role was taken over by Anibal Maraque, who seemed to have relinquished his previous life as a grocery store manager for his “uncle” Astaphan and become a zombie hunter full time. He dutifully sat out by the fire in the entrance to the hidden cavern at odd hours with a rum bottle in his hand and dutifully sucked on it until he appeared, and often was, dutifully drunk. Hey, anything for Ras, man. He was sure to act surly and hostile any time anyone came sniffing around, as hard as that was, given his naturally friendly demeanor.

Visitors came by from time to time, usually late of an evening, bringing food, rum, and weed as needed. Mama Geraldine came by every week on her way back from shopping with some of her Magical Elixir, even though Ras seldom needed it now. He always made sure she left with some of the floaters she loved. The woman amazed him. She would ride the bus back to the stop downso from Bells, where Ras had picked up the pretty schoolgirl, then carry her heavy bags of purchases from town the three miles up the hills and brave that steep incline to her hilltop home. She still shared that home with Sophie, who unfortunately had not improved with the passing of her perverted stepfather. In spite of this, Mama Geraldine swore Ras was a saint for saving her daughter. It embarrassed him. All he’d done was drive her upso one awful day in the rain. She wore her colorful local dresses and her headscarves, and giggled about how the men bothered her for her time day and night. She would scold him for not visiting his friends in the bamboo house any more, and he would promise to see them soon, but she knew better, and he didn’t go.

Primm would come and Ras would pay him to bring rum from Bryzees, or Kubulis from Astaphan’s, or the best weed the Customs men had confiscated at the airport that week. He paid damn good money for it, and for information too, but after all, the man was deaf. He’d sacrificed a lot. He wondered briefly how Primm gathered that information, given his disability, but decided he didn’t need to know. He always made sure Primm left with an extra ten dollars. Well, ten dollars EC, anyway. He hadn’t taken the little sucker to raise, whether God liked it or not.

Mattias did him a favor and went to the Hummingbird Hotel to collect his things. Ras instructed him to bring the clothes and money but to send his personal effects, his driver license and so on, back to the States as if he were dead. He’d forgotten that his camera contained the photos of the giant reefers. When he realized his mother would see the pictures, he hoped she’d understand.

Uncle Charlie’s money was still at his disposal in the Royal Bank of Canada, General Delivery, Roseau, Dominica, WI. It was the safest place he could think of. As far as he was concerned, he’d done the service his mother had requested, and the rest was now his. He figured he could scour the island paradise clean of vampires or die trying with the sum of money he had, while living about as comfortably as a near-zombie could expect in these trying times. The truth was, he felt good, for the first time in years. He could eat live rodents, lizards, anything. He drank beer and rum like a fish swims, slept on stones and woke up ready to dance. Mom would be hurt to think he had died, but he saw no choice. There was no going home. Often, as the night came on, he and his friends would gather and hunt zombies. That money might have to last a long time.

The End – For Now

2 comments:

MoristotleFriday, September 18, 2020 at 3:06:00 PM EDT
Congratulations, Roger! One sure has to scroll down a long way to leave a comment. <smile>
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Roger OwensFriday, September 18, 2020 at 6:33:00 PM EDT
Drinking Kubulis is without a doubt the craziest and most fun story I have ever written. I will say that nearly all of the events in the book actually occurred, including the storm itself, which went on to be Hurricane Charlie that kicked Florida's butt, the young girl at the bus stop. The wife was with me but it happened just like that, with me literally unable to discern MY OWN NAME as the name of the town she lived in (Roger). The young stud from the Dominican Republic on his expensive bike on top of the mountain in Attley is a real person; he literally fell over on the bike 3 times and he wasn't even riding it, just standing there drinking his bush rum. I indeed guzzled some of it; nothing but good ol' moonshine rum!
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Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café

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Drinking Kubulis
at the Dead Cat Café