Catacombs

by John Farris

  Jade, his normally sharp eyes milky with the pain from his wound, which had not been looked at by a doctor, said little. His mood was even, thoughtful, almost placid. He betrayed no anxiety. He insisted on dragging her around the small prison several times to study it minutely, and for the second time smashed her expectations of Jade the miracle worker by finding it, under the circumstances, escape proof. Thereafter he sat as quietly as possible, hurting, nauseated by the pain, conserving his energy, letting Raun run through her cycle of emotional adjustments.

  After the physical shock of their first, sunset dousing, and the additional shock of being quickly persuaded to lick every inch of his skin which she could reach with her tongue while he did the same to her, and seeing him sexually aroused while being aroused herself, Raun had a second, inappropriate reaction: a fit of giggles. It exhausted her. Desire dwindled but the bath, the drink, the inadvertent sensuality, restored her wits.

  They were both tired. They lay down together, arms cramped, faces a few inches apart.

  "Matt."

  "What?"

  "Sorry for today."

  "You did okay."

  "Just okay?"

  "Pretty damn good."

  "Thank you. Matt?"

  "Uh huh."

  "Are they going to kill us?"

  "I don't know."

  "'What do you think?"

  "Too early to tell. Right now they're checking us out with a higher authority."

  "They haven't questioned us."

  "They probably will," he said.

  'Will they get–rough?"

  "Yes, they will, Raun."

  "Oh. God."

  "Easy now."

  "I'm okay. I think. Matt, how's your head?"

  "I'm trying to forget about it."

  "That bad?"

  He didn't reply. She closed her eyes, sighing. It was still damned hot in the box, but the wet floor felt good. So did being near him, with their knees touching, arms tightly linked, even though her fingers kept getting numb.

  "This is my fault," she said. "I want you to know that."

  "I'm the one who got shot."

  "No. No. It's my fault we were there at all. It was the wrong place, Matt. I lied to you, all along."

  He whistled dismally. "Jesus."

  "This must be your lucky day," Raun said, and began to cry.

  "So where is it, Raun?"

  "K-Kilimanjaro. High up. About sixteen thousand feet. Sort of a cul-de-sac. You get to it from the Nyangoro track, which is too difficult above twelve thousand feet for all but experienced climbers. When you get there–it's really tricky the way the Catacombs are hidden away, but I meant what I said–nothing but mummies."

  "Much more to it than that, Raun. Your father made an extra discovery, he just couldn't tell you about it; probably for reasons of security. The Chapman/Weller expedition found the remains of a highly technical civilization that flourished in the area ten thousand years ago. They had the Bomb, pop-up toasters, everything that makes life worthwhile. Including an anti-ballistic missile system that might really work. The mathematics of it are preserved on red diamonds. I've seen one. We want the rest of the diamonds. So do the Russians."

  "The diamonds are in the Catacombs? I really did us in, didn't I?"

  "Why tell me now?"

  "Because I wanted–want to make love to you, and I couldn't, can't, want a man I'm not totally honest with. Does that make sense?"

  "Yes." He studied her for a long time and didn't say or do much, just linked a little linger with hers and held on tightly. "We could probably work something out even handcuffed like this. But to tell the truth Raun, I've had a hard day and I'm not up to it."

  "I'm not either."

  "Thanks for telling me anyway. I was wondering if you would."

  "You knew?"

  "I knew that you had a lot on your mind and that something wasn't kosher when I took my first look around day before yesterday. I just had a bad feeling."

  "Now, l-look at us." Raun sniffed back more tears. "Matt, what about Lem?"

  "If he isn't here, he's still there."

  "But did you see him?"

  "No."

  "One of the soldiers on my helicopter had his–you know, the dead shellacked tarantula he was so proud of, and there were some blond hairs clinging to it–"

  "Okay," Jade said, after a dismal silence broken only by the faint strangled sobs in her throat as she tried to keep her grief to herself. "They got him, then. Try to get some shut-eye, Raun."

  "They got him, then?' Is that all you're going to say?"

  "Do you want me to try to make you feel less guilty? Not tonight, Raun. Probably not ever."

  After that she thought he wasn't going to speak to her again. She drifted off to sleep, dreamed fearfully of helicopters like giant insects pursuing her.

  He woke her from a nightmare some time during the night. He had something urgent to tell her. His speech was a little slurred.

  "Raun?"

  "Yes, Matt?"

  "Lem knew the risks. I don't blame you. Don't take it the way I made it sound."

  "I'm a stupid cunt and I'm sick of myself."

  "But you're not a quitter. Not by a long chalk, as the–limeys say. I want you to know that I admire that. Were you always such a tough kid?"

  "Damn–right."

  "So you held off a couple of maniacs with knives back there in prison. You took a stiff jail sentence when all you had to do was whine and grovel a little bit. What I'm saying is, it's–balls against the wall again. Even when it looks like you're down to a minute to live, half a minute maybe, don't quit trying to find a way out."

  "Just whistle up a guy with a big S on his sweatshirt."

  "That asshole's never around when you want him. Try going crazy. I mean it. Twitch all over. Fall down. Foam at the mouth. Make strange noises. You're dealing with men who may be reluctant to pull the trigger on somebody who looks and acts possessed. The one who kills you could be afraid of haying the evil spirit in you fly up his nose. Do you follow?"

  "Don't make me laugh, it hurts."

  "Think about it."

  "You're a long way from my dreamboat. You have some personal idiosyncrasies that worry me. I love you anyway."

  "Since we're being so gut-level sincere with each other, I think I ought to tell you you have great tits."

  "I know it."

  Later she awoke shivering and heard Jade moan, just once, through his teeth. Her hands, up to the manacled wrists, were like blocks of wood. She slept again. In the morning they were both flogged awake by water spurting through the vent.

  There was something different about Jade, a difference that scared her. His movements, under duress, were slow and awkward. With his face close to hers as he licked slowly she saw that the pupil of one eye was larger than the other. She knew this meant something was seriously wrong inside his head: a hemorrhage beneath the skull, pressure, brain tissue dying off. He seemed to hear only dimly when she spoke to him; she had to repeat questions two or three times.

  Now Raun was in charge. Her teeth chattered. She made him get to his feet. He looked and acted doped. The left side of his face was slack, the mouth pulled down in a funny way. He admitted, without distress, that he couldn't feel anything there. The rush of blood to Raun's hands was agonizing, but at least they were alive.

  For ten minutes she screamed, until she was hoarse, for a doctor, paused, repeated herself in every language she knew. No one came to find out what she was carrying on about.

  When she wasn't calling futilely for help, she spent the rest of the stifling day talking to Jade, trying to get him to respond. He had a few short lucid periods; then he seemed to disappear into a haze. All he wanted to do was sleep, hunched against her. She wouldn't let him go to sleep. She rocked him and shouted in his ear. When he lifted his head enough to look at her, the enlarged pupil of his eye seemed huge compared to the other one.

  Finally, too dehydrated to utter more than a croak, her n
ervous system drained, she slept herself until the nightly hosing. Nearly forty hours had passed since they had been locked away. She nuzzled against Jade, licking the water from the hollow of his throat, catching the precious drops as they ran down his chin from his soaked hair. He tried to lick too, responding to the body's mindless instinct for survival. His lips were puffed and scaly. He soon gave up the effort and sat trembling randomly against her. Broken speech patterns became isolated bits of nonsense.

  "Pubby," he said.

  "Matt."

  "Luxaweep."

  "God damn it, no. No! You can't die like this! It just can't happen. Not to me. Not again. Don't you understand how much I love you and need you?"

  His mouth stretched softly, like warm taffy, into the approximation of a grin. Saliva roped down from the lower corner of his mouth. Urine puddled beneath his slack penis; he'd become incontinent. The brain continued slowly to deteriorate. He panted.

  "Warcricken?"

  "Three goddam months! That's how long it took Andrew to die. The same cancer that killed his father and grandfather. How's that for fair, huh? How's that for a break in life? I had just six months with him, Matt! We counted on a year at least. But I'm glad there was that much time, because otherwise he would have died in jail and I would never have seen him, touched him again. While he sat there on trial, day after day, he'd look back at me; I knew he was starting to die, but what could I do about it? I thought it would be easy. It was a good plan. I never dreamed anyone would be hurt or killed. I thought we were all on the side of the angels. Life isn't like that, is it? Life is so goddamned messy and full of accidents and wrecked schemes. We do ourselves in. We do others in. And sorry doesn't get it. Not anymore."

  He made it through the night. His withdrawal was steady but almost unobtrusive. First the galvanized twitchings ceased; he became leaden, unmoving. His breathing was so shallow it was nearly undetectable. Raun lay down with him when she could no longer endure the strain of holding him upright anymore, but she didn't close her eyes through the dark hours.

  She talked almost without pause, whispered when she couldn't talk, murmured old songs of childhood. When his breathing seemed to have stopped for good she shook him frantically like a wind-up toy and was rewarded by a long-drawn convulsive breath that somehow got his lungs going again. She frequently put an ear to his chest; the machine ground on. He had a remarkable body; it just wouldn't quit. But she realized in her heart that almost nothing of Matthew Jade remained in the vital areas, the links and circuits of the grossly insulted brain. All this from a head wound he had told her was superficial.

  He cooled during the night and stayed cold. No perspiration. She tried to feel a pulse in his throat but her fingers were numb again, receiving no messages.

  The morning gush of the hose had no effect on Jade. His eyes were closed. She screamed for a doctor again, and was ignored. She was too stunned to cry anymore.

  Despite her best efforts to stay awake she dozed off. It might have been for five minutes, or an hour. When Raun awoke the box was heating up. Her tongue was thick and sluggish in her mouth. Outside the soldiers were drilling, she heard shrill commands in Swahili, the slap of palms against rifle butts. She stared at Matthew Jade's gray face. His body was inert. There was an ant on his forehead. She tried to brush it away but couldn't reach it. Then she made the effort to listen for his heartbeat. There was no heartbeat.

  She sat up, struggling for balance as she dragged his body after. It was awhile before she could utter more than primitive, screechy, inconsolable sounds. Then the words burst clear from her throat.

  "He's dead

  …dead–dead–dead–dead–DEAD!

  Maybe now they would come. Too late.

  The scout helicopter of the jeshi la Wananchi la Tanzania, the People's Defense Force Air Wing, flew north from Chale Point along the shoreline of Lake Tanganyika at an altitude of three hundred feet. Aboard was the pilot, a Libyan named Habib, and a Tanzanian Army corporal, George Asani, who was the lookout. Corporal Asani carried a Kalashnikov and the helicopter, an old Cayuse, was armed with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.

  Only a little dust haze from the steppes beyond Makari marred an otherwise perfect day, and visibility was good. At the base of Mount Kungwe, Habib headed inland, rising over the forest; mud-brown elephants fled ponderously, ears flapping, from the shadow of the copter as the noise interrupted their feeding and socializing. The forests of Kungwe, scored by deep defiles and occasional pockets of meadow, teemed with animal life, which Corporal Asani saw without seeing: wildebeest, warthog, baboon, gorilla. Halfway up Kungwe but completely enclosed by forest canopy was what appeared from the air to be the glittering rusty-black pupil of an eye, almost surrounded by a sclera of small pieces of gray-white granite which was too porous to support any but rudimentary types of vegetation. The meteor was a big one; if fully excavated it might have weighed twenty tons. It was one of the recent–in terms of thousands of years–meteors that had fallen on Tanzania, probably about the time the Lords of the Storm conceived FIREKILL.

  The whole of the eye, looking like a three-quarter moon with a black hole in it, was perhaps one hundred feet long and sixty feet wide. The exposed part of the meteorite was a ragged irregular mound about eight feet in diameter. They had flown over the eye numerous times on patrol. But today Corporal Asani noticed, near the outer corner, a teardrop: what was unmistakably the facedown body of a man in boots and paramilitary uniform. His blond head was uncovered to the sun. Crooked-neck buzzards were in attendance, already beginning to feast.

  The corporal tapped Habib on the shoulder and used sign language to indicate that he wanted him to circle and come in lower, hover at treetop level. He took his binoculars from their case and raised them to his eyes.

  "I don't want to get too close," Habib complained loudly. "Who knows what the buzzards will do? They are stupid birds. They have killed too many pilots by flying where they shouldn't."

  "Then stay away; just let me have a closer look."

  Corporal Asani focused on the body, the gleam of nearly new boots. Too many buzzards had come to the party. One of them had fingers, a hand, in its beak, and was tugging, trying to rip off meat. He couldn't see the dead man's face for the jostling and the feathers. The body seemed small, foreshortened, but that might have been from the distortion of his angle of view.

  At any rate, positive identification was called for. He ordered Habib to set the chopper down.

  "The rock is no good; too loose."

  "Find a level place. You shouldn't have any problems. Do what I say."

  Habib landed gingerly but without incident. He cut the engine, and the rotor blades slowly wound down to a stop. A few of the brown buzzards had flapped into nearby trees at the appearance of the helicopter, but now they were hopping down again and running gruesomely toward the body, their heads a little like the heads of reptiles, darting in to snatch at spoiled meat.

  Corporal Asani got out of the helicopter and one-handedly fired a burst from his Kalashnikov over the heads of the buzzards. It succeeded in scattering them again. Habib also got out of the chopper for a stretch and a smoke.

  The corporal walked around the mound of the meteorite, boots crunching through the sharp pieces of granite, a rock that had to be almost as hard as the meteorite itself to have resisted the soft erosions of time, the rains of millennia. It was a mini-desert in a jungle, able to stop the encroaching power of roots, repress the fertility of seeds in bird droppings. Some toxic chemical leeched from the meteor might have held off the forest. For Corporal Asani the eye of Kungwe was unremarkable in a land where major quirks of nature abounded.

  The closer he came to the corpse, the more puzzled he was. The uniform, he could see now, fit very badly, particularly below the waist. The man had had very short legs. But his arms were long, the backs of his hands exceptionally hairy. He was not a black man, not with that garish blond hair, but his complexion was dark brown. He seemed to be bearded. And he h
ad tufted ears. . . .

  Grimacing, unable to assimilate what he was seeing, Corporal Asani extended his rifle, caught the gunsight in the blouse collar at the back of the neck, lifted the head and torso, and found himself staring at the fly-covered face of a dead chimpanzee.

  Almost beneath his feet there was an explosive upheaval of granite pieces and soupy buzzard shit and feathers, and a hand with a hunter's skinning knife appeared. Just as he glanced down with a flash of horror going off in his belly, the mirror blade lanced into his groin, ripped upward to his belt buckle, stuck there, and was withdrawn as the rocks continued to fly. The naked barrel chest and broad shoulders and finally the dust-gray spooky face of a man with gold-lined teeth rose from the shallow grave.

  Asani's assassin plunged the knife into him again just below the breastbone, the blade angled to split the heart in two. Another hand shot up to take possesson of his rifle and then Corporal Asani, spouting blood, was shoved violently backward, head whiplashing, eyes flung open but blinded by the hard dazzle of the sun; he was dead a moment after he hit the ground.

  Lem Meztizo the Third rose full length beside the body of the chimp. He wore nothing but underwear shorts and boot socks. He was spotted with the blood of the man he had just killed. His hair had been shorn nearly to the roots by his own hand. His teeth glinted in the light, his eyes were fiery from dust and a fever.

  He trained the Kalashnikov on Habib, who was moving with commendable swiftness trying to get back into the helicopter, and nearly blew him apart at the base of his spine, taking care to keep the train of fire low so as not to seriously damage the helicopter.

  He paused long enough to retrieve his boots from the chimpanzee, which he had found dead, of fifty-caliber machine-gun fire from a helicopter gunship, on the perimeter of their Kungwe camp the evening of the day the patrol carried off Raun Hardie and Matthew Jade. He put the boots back on. He took Corporal Asani's garrison cap and put that on too. With most of his hair gone it wasn't a bad fit. Then he carried the Kalashnikov rifle to the helicopter, limping heavily on a sprained ankle, pulled Habib from the copter doorway, and climbed aboard.