Indiana ZOMBIE!
Title: Bel Garcon
Author: tweezle, aka N.
Fandom: Indiana Jones.
For: lawofsyllogism who gave the lovely prompt "In light of the military's withdrawal from Haiti, Indy decides that this would be an excellent time to check out the local folklore..."
Wordcount: 3,093
Notes: I will not lie to you - I wrote this in something like two days. The town in question does not exist, and has a crappy joke for a name (as does the other professor). Unnoffical soundtrack for this fic consists of songs by LaVern Baker, Lillian Boute, and the banda drum samples located at Voudoun Dot Com.
Hats off to the Baron, who is indeed a fine fellow.
Haiti. 1934.
It is a Saturday. The thick night air beats in time to the banda rhythm; a monstrous heart in the center of a lush, sweating organism.
“Papa Guedhe, you is hungry, Papa Guedhe...”
The black goat utters a single cry before the knife descends, viper quick, and cuts its throat. Hot blood spurts over dirt and cornmeal.
“Papa Guedhe, see what I have brought you. Meat, Papa. Rum. I call you, Papa. I call the walking dead.”
Stirring, in the darkness.
“Wake em, Papa. They is hungry. I will feed them.”
“It’s a ghost town, Jones. Don’t waste your time.”
These words, spoken by one Professor Davis at Marshall College, echoed in Indy’s head as he set his baggage down in the middle of an empty dirt road. Davis was a botanist, recently returned from Haiti where he had been conducting research during the US occupation. With the US forces now pulled out of the country, Davis had decided that Haiti was NOT the place to be when one was a white American, and so had returned to the college.
Boring. Except...
Davis had returned with an interesting story. Dozens of US troops, it seemed, had not returned home once the orders to pull out had been given. Not a single one of the missing had left any indication of where they might have gone; they were AWOL and nowhere to be found.
In particular, a small town by the name of La Cimetière, just north of Port-Au-Prince, which had been mostly populated by American soldiers, had been basically deserted.
Interesting. More so...
There had been only one reported sighting of one of the missing soldiers: a young private sent with a group to look for the missing men had been coming back from relieving himself in the bushes when he saw what appeared to be an officer squatting in the bushes. At the sound of his approach the officer turned, and the young private swore up and down that the face of the officer in question had been partially decomposed.
He had run screaming back to his group, who had searched the area and found nothing.
“What do you think he really saw?” Indy had asked Davis. They had been in the faculty lounge of Marshall College, both in-between classes. Davis, a thin, balding man who resembled nothing so much as a bird with glasses, had sighed irritably.
“How should I know? Most likely it was a hallucination, probably brought on my dehydration and the heat.”
“You don’t really think that.”
“No, I suppose not,” bristled the other man. “That’s a BAD area, Jones. The locals claim a bokor resides in the area - that is, some sort of witch doctor with the rather nasty habit of killing people and bringing them back to life to use as slaves.”
Indy had raised an eyebrow. “Raising the dead?”
Davis had shaken his head. “Superstitious nonsense that you’ll find all over the island. Zombis, they call them. Personally, I think that it’s more likely that the witch-doctors are using some of the psychotropic plants found in abundance on the island to induce a trance-like state in people whose deaths have been staged.” He frowned. “In fact, that was one of the theories I had been working on while I was there. Pity.” He glanced up into Indiana’s face.
“Jones,” the older man said waspishly. “Don’t even think it.”
It’s a ghost town, Jones. Don’t waste your time.”
Looking around, Indiana Jones was inclined to agree with the statement. Doors stood open and not even the meager breeze moved on the deserted road. Everything was still, empty, and dead.
Indy wiped sweat from his brow. “Okay,” he muttered aloud. “So it’s not a party town. At least I get my pick of accommodations...”
The morning of his third day, Indiana woke to the sound of singing.
“…he’s dressed all in black,
He is going to the palace…”
The language was French; although rusty, Indy could still understand the words. He clambered out of his bedroll and, after quickly pulling on a pair of pants, poked his head out the door of the house in which he’d been camping.
“Hey,” he called in French. There was a young woman coming down the road, a basket held expertly on one hip. She stopped at the sound of his voice, but she did not seem startled or afraid.
“Hey,” she replied. Her complexion was the colour of good cream in coffee.
Indy wandered closer, aware that although it was morning it was already warm. “I’m Doctor Indiana Jones,” he offered. “From Marshall College.”
“You’re a long way from home, Doctor Jones,” the girl replied. She was barely into her twenties, Indy guessed.
“Yeah, that I am,” he agreed, and smiled. “I was starting to think this whole area was deserted.”
“It is,” the girl said seriously. “Nobody lives here.” She pointed down the road. “I live the next village over. Jus' out getting some flowers and things.”
“Things?” Indy peered at the basket.
The girl smiled. “I’m Mallorie.”
Indy smiled back. “Nice to meet you, Mallorie.”
The girl started walking again and Indy fell into step beside her. “Why doesn’t anyone live here anymore?” he asked conversationally. “With the soldiers gone I’d have thought the buildings would be claimed pretty quickly. Some of them are pretty big.”
Mallorie eyed him warily, and then shrugged. “There is a bad spell on this place,” she told him.
“What sort of spell?”
Mallorie stopped walking and turned to face him fully. “You better off not knowin’, Doctor Jones,” she said. She smiled once more, and it turned her face into something radiant. “Why don’t you come for dinner with my family tonight? Beats staying alone. Non?”
Dinner. “I’ll be there,” Indy replied with a wink.
The girl positively beamed. “My house, it’s green. You’ll find it.” She took a few steps backwards, smiling, then turned and walked away, singing once more.
“Bel Garcon!
He is a fine fellow, he is dressed all in black…”
Watching her dwindling form, Indy smiled. “Think I’ve got a date,” he muttered.
The house was green, and he did find it.
Mallorie, he found, lived with two young children, a boy of about sixteen, a woman who appeared to be older than god, and a steel-faced man who was probably in his sixties. She was either the only one who spoke French, or the others all feigned misunderstanding. Indy wasn’t sure which it was, but the result was the same.
“Is this you father?” he asked quietly as Mallorie served hot food onto his plate. Steel-Face sat across from him, seemingly unblinking.
Mallorie smiled. “Non, Doctor Jones. He is not my relation.” Choosing not to expound, she turned away to serve one of the children.
Indy looked across the table. Steel-face stared back. Conversation, Indy decided, would be fruitless and so he concentrated on his food.
“Mallorie,” Indy said as he chased some beans with his fork, “I was told that there’s a bokor in the area. Do you have any idea of where I could find him?”
Silence. Indy glanced around the table to find nobody eating and everyone staring at him.
“Uhm,” he started.
Steel-face started yelling in Creole, and Indy suspected it wasn’t, “my goodness our guest is a pleasant gentleman.” Mallorie jumped out of her chair and rushed to the man’s side, trying to placate him. The old woman look Indy dead in the eye, shook her head, and very distinctly mimed slitting her throat.
“I should go,” Indy said, standing. "Thanks for the lovely meal, Mallorie.” He exited quickly, jamming his hat on his head as he did so.
He was partway down the street when he heard footsteps. “Doctor Jones!” Mallorie called after him. He stopped, turned, waited.
Mallorie stopped before him, face flushed. “Loulou - the old man- he’s a houngan,” she explained. “He knows what spells lies over La Cimetière, and that to speak of it brings worse than death.”
“Look,” Indy said. “There’s a bunch of soldiers missing, Mallorie. You must know that. And those boys have families back in the States who want them to come home. If your houngan in there knows something, you’ve got to convince him to tell me.”
Mallorie bit her full lower lip. Eventually she nodded. “I’ll do as you ask. But I warn you, Doctor Jones, that you court Death, and he is always hungry.” She turned on her heel and ran back to her house.
Sunset in Haiti; blood drenched the sky and turned the trees into deep black shadows where a man could lose his soul.
Loulou’s French was about as good as Indy’s own, and he spoke slowly and in a deep baritone that seemed at odds with his skeletal frame. He and Indy walked along the border of town, watching the red sky slowly fade to purple and black.
“I’ve been told,” Indy said, “that the bokor have ways of making people think they can raise the dead.” He arched an eyebrow. “That they poison a man and then, after he has been buried, revive him and keep him slow and stupid with potions.”
Loulou snorted. “You’re a white man,” he said. “You do not know Haiti. You do not know the lwa, the gods that grow here in fertile soil.”
“Maybe not,” Indy conceded. “But I do know that a white man says he saw one of those missing soldiers, and that he claims the soldier was a dead man.”
Loulou walked in silence for a while. “I can show you,” he said at length. His eyes were unreadable. “But you might not live to tell the tale, Doctor Jones.”
There was movement behind him, and Indy tried to turn. Too late. A cloth, soaking wet and smelling strongly of almonds, was held over his mouth and nose. The last thing he saw before he passed out was a sky the colour of old bruises, bleeding red at the edges.
“Papa Guedhe bel garcon
Guedhe Nimbo bel garcon
He is dressed all in black
He is going to the palace…”
Furious drumbeats pounded Indy’s skull, bludgeoning him into consciousness. The rhythm was rapid, just short of frantic, and constant. Opening his eyes, Indy found himself tied to a post in the middle of what passed for La Cimetière’s town square. There was a fire lit, and dancing around it was the old woman from Mallorie’s house. Her skin was like obsidian in the firelight, shining wetly with sweat. The drummer, he saw upon closer inspection, was the teenage boy.
“Your curiosity has cost you your life, Doctor Jones.”
Loulou stepped out of the shadows, his face still expressionless. In one hand he held a rope leash that was looped around the neck of a black goat, “I hope it was well worth it,” he said.
"You’re the bokor,” Indy said. A musical laugh echoed from behind him, and Mallorie moved into the flickering light as well.
“No, Doctor Jones,” she said. “I am.” She turned to Loulou, who stood with his head bowed. “Prepare the sacrifice,” she commanded, and he nodded before leading the goat to the center of the square.
“Surprised?” she asked.
“Not really,” Indy replied, pulling a little at his restraints. “Beautiful women are always trouble. I would like to know WHY, though, since I thought you were just going to feed me dinner.”
“Funny. It all comes down to feeding,” Mallorie said. “’Everybody hungry.’ It’s the first law of the universe.” She smiled sweetly, but her voice was cold as a moonless night. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your home run by foreigners, Doctor Jones? To see you and your kind treated no better than dogs in the street, while men with guns dictate how you should live your life? And if you stand against them, what then? Death.”
She looked him in the eye, and Indy saw her hands were clenched into fists. “So I said to myself, ‘we need no more killing. Let them that is already DEAD do the fighting.’” She smiled again. “And why would we want black slaves? Non. I enslaved the soldiers, Doctor Jones. I have turned them into zombis - the walking dead. They do as I command now.”
“You drugged them,” Indy said.
Mallorie laughed. “There are no drugs to do what I have done,” she said. “But you will see now, very soon.” She danced away from him, her face a mask of bogus sorrow. “The trouble, you see, is keeping them fed.
Death is ALWAYS hungry, Doctor Jones."
She began then to dance with the old woman, singing. The two of them spun around the fire like wraiths, black against orange, writhing like women possessed.
“Papa Guedhe!” Mallorie was calling. “Papa Guedhe!” She scooped up handfuls of cornmeal from a bag that had been placed nearby and began pouring it on the ground in a pattern; a box surmounted with a cross, two coffins t either side. She crooned softly the entire time, and the old woman kept dancing to the frenzied beat of the drums.
Loulou moved forward, holding the goat still. Mallorie moved quickly, her mouth pulled up at the corners in a lunatic’s grin, and slashed the creature’s throat. The thick, salty scent of blood stained the damp night air.
“You feed your zombies goat?” Indy asked. He worked as subtly as he could on the rope holding his left wrist, rotating it back and forth. Soaking with sweat as he was, he felt slipping from his bonds was a possibility. He just needed more time...
Mallorie was still grinning, panting now too. “No,” she said. "This meat is for Papa Guedhe, the lwa of death.” She wiped a strand of hair from her face, leaving a streak of blood on one cheek. “YOU are for the zombies, Doctor Jones.”
She turned away and spread her arms as though to embrace the fetid darkness. “I call the walking dead!” Mallorie cried. “Wake ‘em, Papa! They is hungry, and I will feed them!”
Indy was concentrating on freeing himself and hoping that Mallorie wasn’t planning on slitting his throat as she had the goat’s when he heard something. A shuffle. A slow, dragging footstep.
Drugged, he thought as he tried to ignore the fact that all the spit in his mouth appeared to have dried up. It’s just a bunch of confused people this witch has drugged so don’t panic, don’t panic...
Low, clotted groans were drifting on the night air. Figures were approaching the town square, moving slowly.
Don’t panic don’t panic don’t...
The soldiers reached the outmost reach of the firelight. One of them had no lips, Indy saw; his teeth poked out of his face in a ring, chomping feebly at nothing. Another, so far as he could tell, had clumps of squirming maggots in his eye sockets. Several were missing limbs - one unfortunate bastard had no legs and was dragging himself across the ground with a terrifying patience.
DON’TPANICDON’TPANICDO--
His body wasn’t really listening - it was jerking at the restraints as hard as possible and accomplishing nothing. The zombies moved slowly but they also moved towards him unerringly and with single-minded purpose.
I’m fucked, Indy thought.
And then things got weird.
He fainted. Except he didn’t lose consciousness. In fact, his eyes stayed open and he could see everything that was happening. He just couldn’t move, or talk, or even panic quite so much anymore.
“Mallorie, you abuse the gifts your Papa gave you,” a nasal voice said. Indy realized with some surprise that although the voice was most certainly NOT his, it was coming from his mouth. “You confuse yourself with the lwa.”
Mallorie stood frozen, her hands raised above her head and her mouth a snarl. “Your tricks won’t save you, Doctor Jones,” she said, but fear lurked in the depths of her mad eyes.
A raspy cackle. “No trick of his!” Indy’s mouth shouted. And then he began to sing, in Creole interjected with words he had never even heard before.
Mallorie’s hands fell to her sides and her face blanched. “Gu-“ she had time to say before the zombies fell on her. Indy saw, with eyes that refused to look away, that she was still alive when the walking dead tore open her abdomen and pulled her intestines out like sausages.
Loulou made a break for it, but the shambling, inexorable horde crashed over him like a noxious wave. One of the zombies poked strangely delicate skeletal fingers into his eye sockets, impaling the globes of jelly on the tips. The zombie then popped the eyes into its mouth whole.
The stink of blood clung to the hot night air like a lover.
As suddenly as it had come, the paralysis left Indy’s body. He found when he tried to move his limbs that his bonds had been cut. Slowly, he edged away from the pole to which he had been tethered, trying not to be sick.
The old woman was screaming for help as three zombies gnawed at her legs. She tried to drag herself away, but another zombie shuffled over and started pulling at the soft flesh of her breast.
One of the zombies turned. It had been, Indy could tell by the uniform, a US officer. “Follow him,” the zombie said is a nasal voice, and pointed. Indy turned and saw laying in the middle of the road a huge black snake. It began to move as soon as he looked at it, slithering away into the night. Indy looked back at the corpse.
“Why did it have to be snakes?” he muttered, heart beating staccato in his chest.
The corpse grinned, and the sight made Indy feel like screaming. “You can stay if you like,” it said. “We always hungry.”
Indy followed the snake.
“Doctor Jones!”
Indy paused before turning. He had a lecture scheduled in fifteen minutes time, and he didn’t want to be late. After his return from Haiti, he had all but buried himself in work in an attempt to erase the trip from his memory.
It was Davis. “What do you want?” Indy asked him.
“Did you find anything in Haiti?” the Professor asked, a smug smile on his face.
“Only dead men,” Indy replied. He leaned down and whispered, “but they were hungry. And I wonder, Davis, if that hunger can ever be sated.”
He turned and marched down the hallway. He had a lecture, after all.
Author: tweezle, aka N.
Fandom: Indiana Jones.
For: lawofsyllogism who gave the lovely prompt "In light of the military's withdrawal from Haiti, Indy decides that this would be an excellent time to check out the local folklore..."
Wordcount: 3,093
Notes: I will not lie to you - I wrote this in something like two days. The town in question does not exist, and has a crappy joke for a name (as does the other professor). Unnoffical soundtrack for this fic consists of songs by LaVern Baker, Lillian Boute, and the banda drum samples located at Voudoun Dot Com.
Hats off to the Baron, who is indeed a fine fellow.
Haiti. 1934.
It is a Saturday. The thick night air beats in time to the banda rhythm; a monstrous heart in the center of a lush, sweating organism.
“Papa Guedhe, you is hungry, Papa Guedhe...”
The black goat utters a single cry before the knife descends, viper quick, and cuts its throat. Hot blood spurts over dirt and cornmeal.
“Papa Guedhe, see what I have brought you. Meat, Papa. Rum. I call you, Papa. I call the walking dead.”
Stirring, in the darkness.
“Wake em, Papa. They is hungry. I will feed them.”
“It’s a ghost town, Jones. Don’t waste your time.”
These words, spoken by one Professor Davis at Marshall College, echoed in Indy’s head as he set his baggage down in the middle of an empty dirt road. Davis was a botanist, recently returned from Haiti where he had been conducting research during the US occupation. With the US forces now pulled out of the country, Davis had decided that Haiti was NOT the place to be when one was a white American, and so had returned to the college.
Boring. Except...
Davis had returned with an interesting story. Dozens of US troops, it seemed, had not returned home once the orders to pull out had been given. Not a single one of the missing had left any indication of where they might have gone; they were AWOL and nowhere to be found.
In particular, a small town by the name of La Cimetière, just north of Port-Au-Prince, which had been mostly populated by American soldiers, had been basically deserted.
Interesting. More so...
There had been only one reported sighting of one of the missing soldiers: a young private sent with a group to look for the missing men had been coming back from relieving himself in the bushes when he saw what appeared to be an officer squatting in the bushes. At the sound of his approach the officer turned, and the young private swore up and down that the face of the officer in question had been partially decomposed.
He had run screaming back to his group, who had searched the area and found nothing.
“What do you think he really saw?” Indy had asked Davis. They had been in the faculty lounge of Marshall College, both in-between classes. Davis, a thin, balding man who resembled nothing so much as a bird with glasses, had sighed irritably.
“How should I know? Most likely it was a hallucination, probably brought on my dehydration and the heat.”
“You don’t really think that.”
“No, I suppose not,” bristled the other man. “That’s a BAD area, Jones. The locals claim a bokor resides in the area - that is, some sort of witch doctor with the rather nasty habit of killing people and bringing them back to life to use as slaves.”
Indy had raised an eyebrow. “Raising the dead?”
Davis had shaken his head. “Superstitious nonsense that you’ll find all over the island. Zombis, they call them. Personally, I think that it’s more likely that the witch-doctors are using some of the psychotropic plants found in abundance on the island to induce a trance-like state in people whose deaths have been staged.” He frowned. “In fact, that was one of the theories I had been working on while I was there. Pity.” He glanced up into Indiana’s face.
“Jones,” the older man said waspishly. “Don’t even think it.”
It’s a ghost town, Jones. Don’t waste your time.”
Looking around, Indiana Jones was inclined to agree with the statement. Doors stood open and not even the meager breeze moved on the deserted road. Everything was still, empty, and dead.
Indy wiped sweat from his brow. “Okay,” he muttered aloud. “So it’s not a party town. At least I get my pick of accommodations...”
The morning of his third day, Indiana woke to the sound of singing.
“…he’s dressed all in black,
He is going to the palace…”
The language was French; although rusty, Indy could still understand the words. He clambered out of his bedroll and, after quickly pulling on a pair of pants, poked his head out the door of the house in which he’d been camping.
“Hey,” he called in French. There was a young woman coming down the road, a basket held expertly on one hip. She stopped at the sound of his voice, but she did not seem startled or afraid.
“Hey,” she replied. Her complexion was the colour of good cream in coffee.
Indy wandered closer, aware that although it was morning it was already warm. “I’m Doctor Indiana Jones,” he offered. “From Marshall College.”
“You’re a long way from home, Doctor Jones,” the girl replied. She was barely into her twenties, Indy guessed.
“Yeah, that I am,” he agreed, and smiled. “I was starting to think this whole area was deserted.”
“It is,” the girl said seriously. “Nobody lives here.” She pointed down the road. “I live the next village over. Jus' out getting some flowers and things.”
“Things?” Indy peered at the basket.
The girl smiled. “I’m Mallorie.”
Indy smiled back. “Nice to meet you, Mallorie.”
The girl started walking again and Indy fell into step beside her. “Why doesn’t anyone live here anymore?” he asked conversationally. “With the soldiers gone I’d have thought the buildings would be claimed pretty quickly. Some of them are pretty big.”
Mallorie eyed him warily, and then shrugged. “There is a bad spell on this place,” she told him.
“What sort of spell?”
Mallorie stopped walking and turned to face him fully. “You better off not knowin’, Doctor Jones,” she said. She smiled once more, and it turned her face into something radiant. “Why don’t you come for dinner with my family tonight? Beats staying alone. Non?”
Dinner. “I’ll be there,” Indy replied with a wink.
The girl positively beamed. “My house, it’s green. You’ll find it.” She took a few steps backwards, smiling, then turned and walked away, singing once more.
“Bel Garcon!
He is a fine fellow, he is dressed all in black…”
Watching her dwindling form, Indy smiled. “Think I’ve got a date,” he muttered.
The house was green, and he did find it.
Mallorie, he found, lived with two young children, a boy of about sixteen, a woman who appeared to be older than god, and a steel-faced man who was probably in his sixties. She was either the only one who spoke French, or the others all feigned misunderstanding. Indy wasn’t sure which it was, but the result was the same.
“Is this you father?” he asked quietly as Mallorie served hot food onto his plate. Steel-Face sat across from him, seemingly unblinking.
Mallorie smiled. “Non, Doctor Jones. He is not my relation.” Choosing not to expound, she turned away to serve one of the children.
Indy looked across the table. Steel-face stared back. Conversation, Indy decided, would be fruitless and so he concentrated on his food.
“Mallorie,” Indy said as he chased some beans with his fork, “I was told that there’s a bokor in the area. Do you have any idea of where I could find him?”
Silence. Indy glanced around the table to find nobody eating and everyone staring at him.
“Uhm,” he started.
Steel-face started yelling in Creole, and Indy suspected it wasn’t, “my goodness our guest is a pleasant gentleman.” Mallorie jumped out of her chair and rushed to the man’s side, trying to placate him. The old woman look Indy dead in the eye, shook her head, and very distinctly mimed slitting her throat.
“I should go,” Indy said, standing. "Thanks for the lovely meal, Mallorie.” He exited quickly, jamming his hat on his head as he did so.
He was partway down the street when he heard footsteps. “Doctor Jones!” Mallorie called after him. He stopped, turned, waited.
Mallorie stopped before him, face flushed. “Loulou - the old man- he’s a houngan,” she explained. “He knows what spells lies over La Cimetière, and that to speak of it brings worse than death.”
“Look,” Indy said. “There’s a bunch of soldiers missing, Mallorie. You must know that. And those boys have families back in the States who want them to come home. If your houngan in there knows something, you’ve got to convince him to tell me.”
Mallorie bit her full lower lip. Eventually she nodded. “I’ll do as you ask. But I warn you, Doctor Jones, that you court Death, and he is always hungry.” She turned on her heel and ran back to her house.
Sunset in Haiti; blood drenched the sky and turned the trees into deep black shadows where a man could lose his soul.
Loulou’s French was about as good as Indy’s own, and he spoke slowly and in a deep baritone that seemed at odds with his skeletal frame. He and Indy walked along the border of town, watching the red sky slowly fade to purple and black.
“I’ve been told,” Indy said, “that the bokor have ways of making people think they can raise the dead.” He arched an eyebrow. “That they poison a man and then, after he has been buried, revive him and keep him slow and stupid with potions.”
Loulou snorted. “You’re a white man,” he said. “You do not know Haiti. You do not know the lwa, the gods that grow here in fertile soil.”
“Maybe not,” Indy conceded. “But I do know that a white man says he saw one of those missing soldiers, and that he claims the soldier was a dead man.”
Loulou walked in silence for a while. “I can show you,” he said at length. His eyes were unreadable. “But you might not live to tell the tale, Doctor Jones.”
There was movement behind him, and Indy tried to turn. Too late. A cloth, soaking wet and smelling strongly of almonds, was held over his mouth and nose. The last thing he saw before he passed out was a sky the colour of old bruises, bleeding red at the edges.
“Papa Guedhe bel garcon
Guedhe Nimbo bel garcon
He is dressed all in black
He is going to the palace…”
Furious drumbeats pounded Indy’s skull, bludgeoning him into consciousness. The rhythm was rapid, just short of frantic, and constant. Opening his eyes, Indy found himself tied to a post in the middle of what passed for La Cimetière’s town square. There was a fire lit, and dancing around it was the old woman from Mallorie’s house. Her skin was like obsidian in the firelight, shining wetly with sweat. The drummer, he saw upon closer inspection, was the teenage boy.
“Your curiosity has cost you your life, Doctor Jones.”
Loulou stepped out of the shadows, his face still expressionless. In one hand he held a rope leash that was looped around the neck of a black goat, “I hope it was well worth it,” he said.
"You’re the bokor,” Indy said. A musical laugh echoed from behind him, and Mallorie moved into the flickering light as well.
“No, Doctor Jones,” she said. “I am.” She turned to Loulou, who stood with his head bowed. “Prepare the sacrifice,” she commanded, and he nodded before leading the goat to the center of the square.
“Surprised?” she asked.
“Not really,” Indy replied, pulling a little at his restraints. “Beautiful women are always trouble. I would like to know WHY, though, since I thought you were just going to feed me dinner.”
“Funny. It all comes down to feeding,” Mallorie said. “’Everybody hungry.’ It’s the first law of the universe.” She smiled sweetly, but her voice was cold as a moonless night. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have your home run by foreigners, Doctor Jones? To see you and your kind treated no better than dogs in the street, while men with guns dictate how you should live your life? And if you stand against them, what then? Death.”
She looked him in the eye, and Indy saw her hands were clenched into fists. “So I said to myself, ‘we need no more killing. Let them that is already DEAD do the fighting.’” She smiled again. “And why would we want black slaves? Non. I enslaved the soldiers, Doctor Jones. I have turned them into zombis - the walking dead. They do as I command now.”
“You drugged them,” Indy said.
Mallorie laughed. “There are no drugs to do what I have done,” she said. “But you will see now, very soon.” She danced away from him, her face a mask of bogus sorrow. “The trouble, you see, is keeping them fed.
Death is ALWAYS hungry, Doctor Jones."
She began then to dance with the old woman, singing. The two of them spun around the fire like wraiths, black against orange, writhing like women possessed.
“Papa Guedhe!” Mallorie was calling. “Papa Guedhe!” She scooped up handfuls of cornmeal from a bag that had been placed nearby and began pouring it on the ground in a pattern; a box surmounted with a cross, two coffins t either side. She crooned softly the entire time, and the old woman kept dancing to the frenzied beat of the drums.
Loulou moved forward, holding the goat still. Mallorie moved quickly, her mouth pulled up at the corners in a lunatic’s grin, and slashed the creature’s throat. The thick, salty scent of blood stained the damp night air.
“You feed your zombies goat?” Indy asked. He worked as subtly as he could on the rope holding his left wrist, rotating it back and forth. Soaking with sweat as he was, he felt slipping from his bonds was a possibility. He just needed more time...
Mallorie was still grinning, panting now too. “No,” she said. "This meat is for Papa Guedhe, the lwa of death.” She wiped a strand of hair from her face, leaving a streak of blood on one cheek. “YOU are for the zombies, Doctor Jones.”
She turned away and spread her arms as though to embrace the fetid darkness. “I call the walking dead!” Mallorie cried. “Wake ‘em, Papa! They is hungry, and I will feed them!”
Indy was concentrating on freeing himself and hoping that Mallorie wasn’t planning on slitting his throat as she had the goat’s when he heard something. A shuffle. A slow, dragging footstep.
Drugged, he thought as he tried to ignore the fact that all the spit in his mouth appeared to have dried up. It’s just a bunch of confused people this witch has drugged so don’t panic, don’t panic...
Low, clotted groans were drifting on the night air. Figures were approaching the town square, moving slowly.
Don’t panic don’t panic don’t...
The soldiers reached the outmost reach of the firelight. One of them had no lips, Indy saw; his teeth poked out of his face in a ring, chomping feebly at nothing. Another, so far as he could tell, had clumps of squirming maggots in his eye sockets. Several were missing limbs - one unfortunate bastard had no legs and was dragging himself across the ground with a terrifying patience.
DON’TPANICDON’TPANICDO--
His body wasn’t really listening - it was jerking at the restraints as hard as possible and accomplishing nothing. The zombies moved slowly but they also moved towards him unerringly and with single-minded purpose.
I’m fucked, Indy thought.
And then things got weird.
He fainted. Except he didn’t lose consciousness. In fact, his eyes stayed open and he could see everything that was happening. He just couldn’t move, or talk, or even panic quite so much anymore.
“Mallorie, you abuse the gifts your Papa gave you,” a nasal voice said. Indy realized with some surprise that although the voice was most certainly NOT his, it was coming from his mouth. “You confuse yourself with the lwa.”
Mallorie stood frozen, her hands raised above her head and her mouth a snarl. “Your tricks won’t save you, Doctor Jones,” she said, but fear lurked in the depths of her mad eyes.
A raspy cackle. “No trick of his!” Indy’s mouth shouted. And then he began to sing, in Creole interjected with words he had never even heard before.
Mallorie’s hands fell to her sides and her face blanched. “Gu-“ she had time to say before the zombies fell on her. Indy saw, with eyes that refused to look away, that she was still alive when the walking dead tore open her abdomen and pulled her intestines out like sausages.
Loulou made a break for it, but the shambling, inexorable horde crashed over him like a noxious wave. One of the zombies poked strangely delicate skeletal fingers into his eye sockets, impaling the globes of jelly on the tips. The zombie then popped the eyes into its mouth whole.
The stink of blood clung to the hot night air like a lover.
As suddenly as it had come, the paralysis left Indy’s body. He found when he tried to move his limbs that his bonds had been cut. Slowly, he edged away from the pole to which he had been tethered, trying not to be sick.
The old woman was screaming for help as three zombies gnawed at her legs. She tried to drag herself away, but another zombie shuffled over and started pulling at the soft flesh of her breast.
One of the zombies turned. It had been, Indy could tell by the uniform, a US officer. “Follow him,” the zombie said is a nasal voice, and pointed. Indy turned and saw laying in the middle of the road a huge black snake. It began to move as soon as he looked at it, slithering away into the night. Indy looked back at the corpse.
“Why did it have to be snakes?” he muttered, heart beating staccato in his chest.
The corpse grinned, and the sight made Indy feel like screaming. “You can stay if you like,” it said. “We always hungry.”
Indy followed the snake.
“Doctor Jones!”
Indy paused before turning. He had a lecture scheduled in fifteen minutes time, and he didn’t want to be late. After his return from Haiti, he had all but buried himself in work in an attempt to erase the trip from his memory.
It was Davis. “What do you want?” Indy asked him.
“Did you find anything in Haiti?” the Professor asked, a smug smile on his face.
“Only dead men,” Indy replied. He leaned down and whispered, “but they were hungry. And I wonder, Davis, if that hunger can ever be sated.”
He turned and marched down the hallway. He had a lecture, after all.