Zombies

by Otto Penzler

  A shadow fell across the mausoleum door. The terror-bugged eyes of Professor Schlitz looked in. The thin man pointed at the skeleton.

  “Who’sh there?”

  Eyes on the skeleton, Ranier blurted, “Holy—!”

  The response, of course, was “Holy who?”

  But the insectologist failed to give it. Somewhere in the night outside the sepulchre a succession of sharp gunshots broke the silence like blows on glass. The shots were far away. They were followed up by an undertone baying, a distant many-voiced clamor as of a myriad hounds suddenly sighting a trapped fox. The shots repeated, crackety-crack-crack-crack! and the baying grew.

  “Look!” Professor Schlitz screamed.

  Ranier leapt out into moonlight to see.

  Through holes in the cloud-roof of a valley now visible below this cemetery height, at a lower and distant level in the night, a red smudge was glowing, a flush of fever developing through far-off haze. Sparks darting behind, and bringing to view, a fringe of miniature trees; and bedlam as one might hear it from a cloud high above an opened grating of Hades.

  The drums were thudding again!

  And on a ribbon of blue-black road perhaps a mile below the cemetery, seen where it emerged from fog and followed a cliff-edge into obscurity again, a horseman was riding. Midget in perspective, he broke out of vapour, raced through a drift of moonlight on a downhill gallop. No horseman such as Ranier had seen before! More like the creation of a scared child’s imagination. For that figure bent in the saddle seemed a faceless blob-smear of yellow, a shapeless spook composed of something that gave off fish-scale flashes of moonshine, formless as a watery shadow blown through wind.

  “It’s the hospital on fire! He’s heading there! We’ve got to save the girl—!”

  CHAPTER XXII

  SEIGE AT THE HOSPITAL

  The Pikes Peak Handicap. The Italian Grand National. Oldfield’s coast-to-coast grind. Campbell at Daytona. Galliéni’s immortal taxi-dash to save Paris. All the Indianapolis heats, the hill-climbs, road tests, historic drives and record races of motordom were nothing, Ranier knew, to the drive he started then. Sixty miles an hour in a twelve-year-old Model T implies a steep downhill grade and the fastest ride in the world. Add the hazards of fog, unmarked curves, cliff-rims innocent of guard rails, uncertainties of moonlight and night, and a road that twists and winds in the quick-wrench convolutions of jiujitsu through a mountain maze of Caribbean forest, tropic jungle, canyon and coal-mine invisibility, and you have something more than a joyride.

  Ranier had it. There were times when, the steering gear almost torn from his hands, he marveled that the chassis didn’t rip from the wheels and jump the curve. Moments when the wheels soared over razorback bumps and his head cracked the roof. Bump, swerve, screech and bang on an unpaved stretch. Slewing a hairpin downhill turn as if cracked on the end of an invisible whip. Slam-bam on the grade crossing. Ziff-ziff-ziff the trees went by. The fog cut to whistling mist-ribbons. The night streaming past like soup. Swish! a curve. Zip! an underpass. Rrrrrrt! the narrow span of a mountain bridge. Hmmmmmm on a downhill chute.

  The car spurted and tipped on two wheels. Bounced and shook and jumped like a goat. Pieces broke away and were left behind, the right front fender shying off like a wing shot from a plane. Floorboards came loose under the clutch and things dropped from the dashboard and disappeared. The radiator cap went. The tires, any moment, would explode, the engine drop through, the car burst into a cloud of machinery, nuts and bolts.

  Ranier took his chances without looking. Of that wild down-the-mountain spin, the road itself, he could afterwards remember nothing. He drove like a drunkard, leaving accidents to fate. The road was a vague streak fleeing under the headlamp; there was a steering wheel fastened to his hands; an impression on the eardrums of flying downhill. If he guided the mile-a-minute course it was with seventh-sense instinct and the corners of his eyes. His mind wasn’t in it, but in a burning hospital where a girl might be trapped in a snare of mystery and fire. His face watched through the windshield, but his eyes were glued for a horseman somewhere in the dark ahead, his attention nailed to a rosy smudge in blackness back of beyond.

  The smudge moved around in the sky as the road dodged. On the cliff-edge where they’d spied the horseman it seemed leftward and below. An S-curve later it had moved to the right. At the last it was fixed dead ahead, a crimson mirage above red-stained forest-tops, blushing clouds toiling upward against night, fattening, merging, hanging in a pall. The red light spread in a widening haze. Where the clouds blushed deepest, gold sparks went up in spirals and scrolls, curling and whirling about like the roller-coaster skyline of an amusement park. On the wind a hint of wood-smoke, on the eardrums a sound as of nearing battle, an undertone long-roll pandemonium like a sustained cheering, but too low-pitched for applause.

  “It’s the Voodoo mob! They’re attacking Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital. If she’s there—!”

  Ranier didn’t know he was crying out, for he’d forgotten there was anyone to listen. Professor Schlitz had long since given up trying to call attention to himself, his risked life and the speedometer. Bouncing on broken cushion-springs beside Ranier, he lounged in complete lackadaisy, thin legs outstretched, sun helmet rolling around his shoes, back slumped, face relaxed. What more could happen to an insectologist after a night of larking about graveyards with mummies, bones and back-stabbings? He’d lost his glasses and his teeth. Having abandoned hope for life, he retired into the superb detachment of some auto-race mechanic bored with the hazards of the hundredth lap; fainted.

  HE DID NOT see what Ranier saw. That sudden swerve around a hill of darkness into unnatural light. A last quarter-mile stretch of road leaping visible in fire-glow. Trees red and black standing up in the night; the fog dispersed; landscape around; the sloped silhouette of a ridge ahead, and scarves of blue-scarlet flame leaping up from behind the ridge, their racket drowned by a Baalish tumult of shouts, poundings, gunshots, drum-thunder.

  He did not see what Ranier saw on that otherwise deserted stretch of road between the curve and the ridge. A yellow, shapeless figure that might be a man, dismounting from a roan horse, grabbing the reins, leading the horse off the road into a forest in a tangent toward the flame-lit ridge. Ranier saw those roan hindquarters melt in the underbrush, and set his teeth. But the wheels under him could go no faster. Bolts clattered to the ground as he yanked the emergency at the roadside where the horseman had been. Professor Schlitz went under the dashboard, and the car shocked up short in a nest of ilex scrub. Ranier left them there.

  He was following a path, a horse-tracked bridle trail that ambled through forest toward the crimson-lit ridge. The path ambled, but John Ranier didn’t. Body stooped, he ran Indian fashion, powerfully, sullenly, spurred by scorched wind in his face, the roar of close battle in his eardrums.

  He caught his man at the top of the rise where one could glimpse the burning hospital and the mob. The man was tying his horse to a trailside sapling. His excited hands botched the knot, and his head was turned toward the fire carnival on the slope below. Seen at close range, he was not a spectre, but a lumpish figure in a yellow oilskin raincoat that fell to his shoetops, his face and head almost hidden by the whaleboat brim of a shiny yellow sou’wester.

  Ranier hit him from behind like a panther. Caught him in a headlock, throwing him helpless to his knees as a cowboy bulldogs a steer.

  “Donnerwetter!” the voice exploded under Ranier’s arm. “Who does this to Dr. Eberhardt!”

  “Eberhardt!” Ranier wrenched the man in an arm-lock. “Where have you been all night?”

  “Been? Been? Gott in Himmel! Where do you think I have been? Asleep in some bed? Sitting with folded hands? Then you do not know anything about quintuplets!”

  • • •

  “QUINTUPLETS!”

  It was, of all that red phantasmagoria of demonism, death and madness, the strangest moment, the craziest impossibility of all. That word! Dropped like a spoonful
of milk into that witch’s goulash of mayhem and murder. Against that fog-and-firelight background where the shadows ran flitterjibbet through the mutilated shapes of tropical trees, and the tang of hot wood-smoke invaded a basic perfume of orchids and vegetal decay. That word, on a four o’clock dreary with vanished dead and obligato terror, above the battle yells of black men, the crackle of gunfire, the bedlam of jungle drums. Quintuplets!

  An uncontrollable feeling of laughter came over John Ranier. Staring at a quaint little man in a yellow sou’wester and swaddly oilskins—the figure off a cod-liver oil bottle, for all the world—he saw a face as German as a cooken with funny-paper walrus moustaches and apples for cheeks and innocent confoundment in round blue eyes. And around that figure the vision conjured by the little man’s word—a string of babies, five in a row, black mites as like as five peas in a pod. Babes in that wood! It made the sweat come out on his forehead and his stomach ache.

  “You’ve been all night—to a delivery!”

  The gnome was bewildered. “Why not? Why not? The woman’s husband came for me at seven-forty-five. Of course I told Polypheme to take the car. So I must go in this husband’s buggy. Fifteen miles north in the mountains, and I was not prepared. I had expected next week, diagnosed twins, not a litter! Herr Gott! Five of them. Nothing ready. I must boil water. Wash linen.”

  His voice rose, annoyed, pettish. He’d mislaid his present surroundings and become the absent-minded country doctor impatient with the annoyances of his practise, irritable after a sleepless all-night call.

  “These ignorant Negroes. Quintuplets! At this time! Am I a laundress? A dishwasher? All that I must do. I am busy! I am a scientist, not a baby doctor! But, ja, I must leave my laboratory in the midst of a vital discovery and play stork for five little—!”

  It was remarkable. So remarkable that Ranier, who wanted to reach that storm-swept hospital more than anything else in the world, could only stand with his mouth open, wordless, the sweat of fright on his face and hysterical laughter under his belt. It was the little yellow gnome who woke up first. Staggered back on the path as if realizing for the first time he’d never seen Ranier before. Became indignant, recalling he’d been attacked. Then frightened, his beaver eyes catching firelight, reminding him of his hospital.

  “Himmelkreuzdonnerwetter! Aber, my hospital! My laboratory! What is the meaning of this mob down there! Who are you—?”

  Then Ranier could break into action, grab, point, shout. “The girl. I left Laïs Engles in there! Quick! We’ve got to get her out before they—!”

  “Laïs!” Dr. Eberhardt screamed. “Mein Gott—!”

  Ranier was running. Dragging the gnome in oilskins at his heels. Helter-skelter through dense undergrowth, down-slope, racing for the blazing villa around which fog and smoke tumbled in turmoil and black figures danced ring-around-the-rosy like fiends around a bonfire in the Pit. The farther side of the villa was in darkness, but the near wing, as they drew closer, went up like tinder. A Vesuvius of gold flame jumped skyward. Surrounding grounds came to light under a blizzard of sparks, and Negroes were swarming everywhere, running, jumping, shadows flickering in and out through the blacker boles of trees.

  “They’ve fired the hospital! It is the work of those bocors, those witch doctors! They have incited the natives!” The cod-liver-oil gnome behind Ranier was raging now. “To ruin my work! To capture Fräulein Engles. They will kill her! Sacrifice her! Gott, Gott! See, shooting—!”

  “No—look!” Ranier cried out as he ran. “It’s not the mob’s gunfire. They’re armed with knives. It’s in that upper window!”

  IN THE WINDOW at the villa’s front, overlooking the open gallery in the shadow of the big sablier tree above the driveway. The laboratory window! Its light was out, but another light was there. On and off, on and off, stabbing electric-blue spurts that jabbed out over the sill, flashing and gone with staccato explosions that spanked one-two-three above a bolero of pounded drums, an oratorio of howls, and crashings that sounded like axes on wood.

  Axes on wood! Ox-bowing out toward the highway, the forest path gave a momentary glimpse of the hospital verandah where the mob was packed in mass-meeting fury. Flung stones smashed through the verandah screen, banging the inner wall, and dark shapes were bunched at the front door like firemen, fighting to chop an entry. But they weren’t firemen. Ranier could distinguish their screams; see the flash of axeheads at work; hear the punishing blows above the roar behind them and the spank-spank-spank from that upper window.

  “She’s up there! The girl and Polypheme with a rifle!” His throat prayed, “God! Hold on! Hold on!”

  The little man screamed, “The door cannot last. If those Voodoo priests get their hands on a white girl—!”

  The cry put wings to Ranier’s feet. Yanking the other’s arm, he jerked him into a thicket; fought, dragged, pulled him through dense-grown palms, shaping a course for the hospital’s rear. Bronze smoke lolled around the incendiary wing, and in this acrid smother they broke from the jungle’s wall, unseen by coal-skinned firebugs dodging in the haze.

  The rear grounds where outbuildings and a barn were in shadow, seemed left to a squad of torch-bearers, arson-bent. Dancing savages doing an adagio to a roundelay of meaningless squalls, the glow from their flaming pine-knots putting a crimson polish to ebon muscles, gleaming on curved banana knives, shining on egg-shell eyes and mouths of piano-key teeth.

  Ranier shouted, his voice masked under the din. “Window of the emergency room! In back!”

  He’d be a long time grateful for his foresight in bolting all those shutters; a long time grateful for the memory of that one window which had no hurricane blinds or glass. The black torchbearers, charging the barn, gave the chance for an open dash to that wing which was screened by Poinsettias. Ranier yelled at the gnome, and they made it. Smashing mosquito-wire with a fist, he boosted the little doctor over the sill; followed with a violence that left him breathless, dizzy in the inner dark.

  The room, fitful with running wall-shadows and red reflections, trembled to the pounding of the villa’s front; a rumpus of voices coming up the hall. The small man in sou’wester and oilskins started for the corridor door—the door that in a long-ago dream had been slammed in passing by a dead man with a webbed foot. Ranier cried, “Dr. Eberhardt! Wait!” and fled around the shadowy operating table, fingers stretched toward a bottle-laden shelf.

  Whang! The door was slammed again. Slammed open, this time, bursting inward to catch Dr. Eberhardt in the face, knock him kicking to the floor. Smoke rushed in from the corridor. And a coffee-browned Haitian pyromaniac, a Samson of a man with a stevedore’s torso, vast flat feet, a torch in one Statue of Liberty fist and a banana-knife the size of a headsman’s scimitar in the other. Torch uplifted, he paused on the threshold, glared at two white faces in agreeable surprise. Then he got another surprise.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  MIDNIGHT

  Caught at the medicine cabinet behind the operating table, Ranier had spun at the intrusion of this ogre, not unarmed.

  The black man had no time to comprehend the bottle in John Ranier’s hand. Like a flash Ranier threw. Squarely and truly at the giant’s ace-of-spades nose. Smash! A tiny bomb-burst of shivered glass. A small bright explosion. Vitriol.

  It brought the muscle-monument down plunging, squalling, blinded, thrashing with paws to face against the operating table, spinning in a carom against the medicine cabinet. There was a bull-in-china-shop collision as the dark Samson fell. A cascade of bottle-glass, powders and volatile fluids burying the colossus in a chemical bath. The machete was lost under the pile-up before Ranier had a chance to grab; and a howl from Dr. Eberhardt announced the arrival of a second adversary in the corridor door.

  Ranier met the challenge with a projectile of carbolic. There was a scorched shriek in answer; the burnt face departed the doorway; a new crop arrived. Ranier screamed, “Let ’em have it! Let ’em have it!” thrusting bottles into the little doctor’s hands. Flingi
ng iodine from an uncorked jug, he charged the corridor, shouting, boring through a thresh of wildmen that fought like circus carnivores panicked in a runway. The jam fell back, battle yells changing to peals of anguish as poison bottles burst on mouths of teeth and eyes bleared with scalding chemical.

  Shattering the emptied jug on a woolly topknot, Ranier kicked, slugged and bit a path for the hall, and the gnome in oilskins was a following vengeance, scattering antiseptics on malingerers in the wake. Jubilant screams received them at the corridor’s turn; became frantic howls at the touch of acid. But the dark crush storming through the chopped front doors kept coming, shoved forward by those behind. From wall to wall the hall at stairway’s foot was packed with Haitian rabble, black-skinned, brown, lavender, high yellow; a subway-like riot of tar-brushed faces going Uptown under a display of machetes, pitchforks, clubs, cocomacaque bludgeons, butcher knives.

  That hall was hot. Somewhere a furnace was going under forced draught. The steady monotone of flames shook the building with a menacing chant. Heat breathed through the sidewall opposite the staircase, surcharging the riot-rocked air with an autumnal wood-smoke. Upstairs the pump gun was chattering to a multisonous hubbub as of crockery breaking, wood being kindled; and through that upper smashing of breakage and gunnery and the lower bombination of the fire and the stormed hall, there threaded the jungle-tone of Rada drums and the roar of the crowd outside—wolf-howls, jackal screams, outbursts of song, mad shouts. The rifle cracked small in that hullaballoo, but its sound filled Ranier with a hope that powered his punished body with a reserve charge of dynamite.

  “Hold on! Hold on, upstairs! We’re coming—!”

  A madman fighting madmen to reach the stairway. Punching, tackling, driving a wedge through a sea of torches, teeth, African baseball bats, giant razor blades. Somehow he reached the post. Somehow, the little doctor at heel, he was half-way up the stairs.