by David Wood
Cassandra raised her eyebrows. “He’s here a lot. Especially lately, he’s really been burning the midnight oil. I go home normal hours, you know, four or five, and he’s always still here when I leave. And when I get here in the morning, eight or so, he’s already been up and running for some time.”
“Not always easy being the boss, right?”
Cassandra shrugged. “I guess not. Not like I would know,” she finished with a laugh.
On a whim, Fabi decided to broach a different topic with Cassandra. She looked over at the woman. “Hey, can I ask you something that might seem a little strange?”
Cassandra took on an amused look and said, “No honey, I don’t go that way, if that’s it.”
“Seriously, that’s not it. It’s about...” She lowered her voice and looked behind them to make sure no one was within earshot. “Zombii. I’ve heard there have been attacks recently in Cap-Hatien. Is that true?”
Cassandra shifted in her seat and pursed her lips. She stabbed at a couple of computer keys and then swiveled to look Fabi in the eyes. “Yes. But no one is taking it seriously.” She emphasized the last word with a Creole sing-song lilt.
“There is no actual evidence?”
“Well, no hard evidence yet, as far as I know, but I do know that the zombii reports coincide with the disappearances of people I have personally seen—patients here at this clinic. And then there’s…”
Cassandra cut off the conversation at the sound of approaching footsteps. Two people passed by without lingering, but Cassandra didn’t take up the topic again, returning instead to her work, where she concentrated on the screen. Fabi couldn’t help but wonder what was going on that made her coworker so uncomfortable. She was highly rational in all other respects, but the subject of zombii at Cap-Hatien seemed to have unnerved her completely.
Fabi turned back to her own computer and forced herself to concentrate on her work.
Chapter 21
Sans Souci Palace
Maddock had given up on tracing a tiny crack in the wall when he noticed Bones had frozen, standing stock still. He knew the man possessed an excellent sixth sense of sorts, and during their days in the SEALs, he was often the first to detect an enemy presence.
“What is it, Bones?”
No sooner had he completed the question than they heard the rumble of a vehicle approaching.
Willis headed for the rope. “We’re fish in a barrel if we stay here.” He made his way up the rope and then helped Bones and Maddock climb out.
“Now what?” Bones pointed to a large group of people heading their way. The vehicle had departed.
Maddock eyeballed the throng. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about the way they moved just wasn’t right. They stared straight ahead, their movements not quite robotic, but lacking the natural ease with which a person might normally stroll or even walk. The assemblage of persons reached their location at the edge of the fort. Maddock called out to them a few times in English as well as limited French, but none of the people had a vocal response other than incoherent wheezing and indistinct moans.
Suddenly one of the individuals rushed forward with surprising speed toward Bones, who sidestepped him and clocked his assailant square on the chin. It was a blow that would have knocked out any rowdy drunkard at Crazy Charlie’s Saloon, but this man seemed to be barely fazed.
“Now we run!” Maddock pointed off to their right and took off at a sprint. Bones and Willis were right on his heels. They flew over uneven rock formations and clumps of dirt until they reached the palace’s perimeter wall. Maddock led them to a break in the structure and paused there to gauge the progress of their pursuers—still coming, and fast.
“Let’s go, this should act as a bottleneck for them.” Maddock slipped through the break in the wall, again followed by Bones and Wills.
Their pursuit didn’t delay much, rapidly pouring through the gap. Others appeared on either side, preventing Maddock and the others from doubling back to their vehicle. The trio ran directly uphill, often skipping the switchback trail in favor of climbing straight up.
“Up there!” Maddock shouted. Lungs burning, muscles screaming, he led the way up to a massive building—much larger and more intact than Sans Souci palace. He knew from his research that it was called the Citadelle Laferrière, another popular tourist destination. Cut off from any other escape route, the three had been forced to retreat uphill. Several times they’d tried to evade their pursuers and work their way back downhill to their waiting vehicle, but to no avail. They were hemmed in, choked off by natural landforms and nearly encircled by the line of pursuit. Maddock estimated they’d covered nearly five kilometers. Thankfully all were in excellent shape, because their pursuers had dogged their trail, not flagging for an instant. Maddock and the others had managed to widen the distance between themselves and the pursuit, but it was only a matter of time before they ran out of steam.
Bones stared up at an imposing structure. “If Sans Souci Palace was on a hill, this place is on a mountain.”
Willis surveyed their surroundings in all directions. He lingered on the road behind them. “They’re still coming.”
“Unbelievable,” Bones said. “And they’ve spread out, too. One of us might get past them, but not all three.”
“I nominate Maddock as sacrificial lamb,” Willis said.
“Yeah, right.” Maddock eyed the citadel. “That gang or whatever they are will be on us soon. We don’t want them to catch up to us on open road. We’ll have to make our stand here.”
Bones pumped his fist. “Remember the Alamo! Or somewhere the good guys actually won.”
The trio moved off the road to a path that wended its way up the final stretch to the Citadelle. The way became even tougher going on the upper part of the mountain, and by the time they were near the crest, they could hear the upward progress of the horde as they crunched over brambles and knocked down rocks. The three men forged on and after a while Bones’ whoop signaled that they had reached the plateau on the summit where the citadel was situated.
Before them, the high walls loomed more than one hundred feet tall. It would have afforded defenders a remarkable view of the surrounding area.
“Too bad we don’t have a few sniper rifles handy,” Bones said.
They moved onto a concrete strip probably once used for staging artillery. Signage nearby indicated that the old stronghold was built in 1805 as a means of defense against French invasions. The building, up close, was much more elaborately designed and more intact than the fort at Sans Souci.
“Check it out.” Bones pointed to rows upon rows of round, metal balls a few feet in front of them. “Cannonballs.”
“Hey Bones,” Maddock said, looking down the slope, “maybe you could come back as a tourist some other time, okay? Because we don’t have long before our friends down there get to us.”
“He’s right.” Willis also looked down the mountain, his brow furrowed with concern.
Maddock looked back to the cannonballs and then down the mountain again, where the mob of non-lingual men was that much closer. “I have an idea. From watching these things, I’ve noticed that they can run fast, but they don’t have good lateral movement. They can’t turn well. It’s almost like these are the...”
Willis turned to look at him. “The what?”
Maddock shrugged. “The zombii Rose told us about. Look at the way they move—it’s like certain parts of their senses are just...off.”
He turned and eyed the stack of old ammunition Bones had pointed out.
Bones smiled. “Hell yes. Zombie bowling.”
The cannonballs, though old and rusted, came free with a little persuasion. They were heavy enough that it was only practical for each man to carry two at a time, but they made quick trips and in short order had a good sized pile perched on the concrete strip on the edge of the summit. Below them, the horde was scrambling ever closer; they could hear the ragged rasp of their breathing from those on
the front line.
“Bombs away.” Maddock hefted the first cannonball and gave it an underhanded toss over the mountaintop. It bounced once and then rolled smoothly until it slammed into one of the zombii, cutting it down at the knees. It fell face-first on the ground and attempted to crawl forward, fingers digging into the soft turf.
“Score!” Bones then lobbed the second shot, and then Willis got into the action. Soon the three men settled into a rhythm, lobbing a ball down the hill and then bending down to scoop up another without watching to see the result of the last shot. Many balls missed their mark, but enough hit so that the main thrust of the attacking pursuers was diminished.
When the defending trio had gone through all of their stockpiled ammunition, they returned once more to the main pile to grab one more cannonball each before the still climbing zombii would reach the summit. Returning to the edge, each took down one more marauder with a well-rolled projectile, leaving four more to scramble over the top up onto the concrete strip.
It was now clear that in order to eliminate these final four, the three treasure hunters faced a hand-to-hand fight. Bones backpedaled away from a zombie who lunged at him. He assumed a fighting stance, legs wide, shifting nimbly from foot to foot, a knife in his right hand while his left was extended to block.
“Davy Crockett wins this time!” he said, sidestepping the zombie’s crude hammer blow and then shoving him off the cliff with a swift kick.
“Still with the Alamo?” Willis grunted as he slammed an elbow into the cheekbone of another assailant, knocking him to the ground.
“That’s why we’re awesome!” Bones’ enthusiasm was infectious, and before long all four of the attackers had either been tumbled down the mountain with the others, or else lay at their feet, incapacitated.
Maddock reached down and rifled through the pants pockets of one of them, but found no identification or objects of any kind. He stood and looked around. “We better get out of here before someone sees what happened and we get detained for questioning.”
Bones and Willis agreed, and the three of them set off for a different way back down the mountain.
“Now what,” Willis asked once they had started down an empty path.
Maddock’s eyes focused unwaveringly on the path ahead as he answered. “Something happened to those zombii people to make them that way. We’re going to find out once and for all what it was. More important, I want to know why they were sent after us.”
Chapter 22
Cap-Hatien
Fabi squinted hard at a line on a spreadsheet open on the computer. Beside her, Cassandra was packing up, jingling her keys, shutting down her workstation. The work day was near an end, but since it was her first on the new job, Fabi was eager to make a good first impression. She had identified an anomaly in one of her new clinic’s financial statements and decided to stay a little late to get on top of it while the details were fresh in her mind.
“Girl, you been working all day. Let me show you my favorite local watering hole. Cold drinks, cheap, hot food, cute guys...” Cassandra smiled.
Fabi looked over at her new co-worker and smiled warmly. “Thanks. I really would like to do that, but I’ve come across something I think I can fix in one of the sheets. You know how it is, it’s hard to get back in gear once you leave right in the middle of it. How about tomorrow, okay?”
“They don’t pay us overtime, you know.”
Fabi shrugged. “I know. I guess I’m just a workaholic.”
Cassandra wrinkled her nose and stared at Fabi’s screen for a few moments, then shrugged. “Okay, Fabi. I hope you get it sorted out, but don’t kill yourself. No one expects you to get this whole place running like a top your first day here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Cassandra left and Fabi got back to work at the computer. She didn’t want to say anything about it to Cassandra, lest she was wrong or—even worse—Cassandra had somehow been a part of it—but it looked as though a substantial portion of the clinic’s budget had been rerouted for the past few months into an obscure special project. She was digging deep into the databases now for more information on this project, but at every turn she hit an encrypted file, a hardware firewall or some other security measure. Finally she got a break when she cross-referenced something she read in a cached email to a data backup log file, which gave her a file name. She searched for that file and found it buried deep in an obscure directory.
Opening the file, it became apparent that the project the clinic’s funds were being funneled to was one called HAITI.
Fabi leaned back in her chair and considered the name. Sounded logical enough, pretty straightforward. Probably it was some charity initiative designed to help low income people. She still wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but with the project name she was sure she could find out more, both here on the computer network and tomorrow with a little “social engineering.”
Chapter 23
Tortuga Island, northwest Haiti
Maddock and Bones pulled the dinghy up onto the rocky pebble beach and tilted up the outboard motor. The Sea Foam lay at anchor a few yards away in deeper water. Willis remained aboard, though reluctantly. This wasn’t a place to leave their boat unattended.
After getting back in touch with Jimmy, Maddock had learned from him that this location—home of yet another defense installation, Fort de Rocher, was the site of the earliest recorded zombie activity in the region. Set on a remote island off the main coast, and long associated with pirates and treasure, Maddock decided it was worth investigating in person.
Bones gave a low whistle in appreciation of the fort that dominated the island’s central plateau. “Now that is what I call a fort.”
Maddock finished dealing with the dinghy and also eyed the historic building. An imposing stone facade was situated atop a towering rock spire.
“What’s the deal on this place?” Bones asked.
Maddock recalled what Jimmy Letson had told him. “This is a really old one, erected during the 1600s by buccaneers to defend against the encroaching Spanish. Two dozen cannon overlooked the natural harbor, there.” He turned and pointed to where the Sea Foam rocked gently at anchor.
“So how do we get up there?”
Maddock squinted into the sun as he tried to pick out a route up the near vertical rise leading to the fort’s plateau. “Should be a road on the other side. Let’s check it out.” He walked off the beach into a lightly wooded area. Passing through this was easy going, and soon they emerged onto a plain of knee-high grass that directly abutted the stone spire. Seeing no breaks in the smooth stone face, the duo made their way around the spire though the grass. As they turned the first corner and headed left along the wall, Bones suddenly cried out and began flailing his arms.
“What is it?” Maddock jumped to out to the side so as to get a better look at what was ailing Bones. “What the...”
A brown, furry blob about the size of a bean bag had dropped onto Bones’ head from somewhere higher up on the wall.
“Get it off me!”
Maddock rushed to his friend’s aid, but before he could reach him the big Indian rolled out from under the thing and kicked it away from him. It landed on the grass a few feet away, moving.
“Spider!” Bones yelled, watching the oversized arachnid churn its legs in the air while it lay overturned on its back. He assumed a defensive posture, still ready to fight, but he relaxed when it became clear the huge arachnid was now in its own struggle to regain its feet.
“Come on, Bones, you never shy away from a gunfight but you’re scared of this brainless creepy crawly. We’ve got work to do.” Maddock waved an arm and continued moving at a near trot along the wall.
“That’s the biggest freaking tarantula I’ve ever seen! Weird.” With that he joined Maddock on the path around the wall. “Besides, it just surprised me. I’m not…” He cut off when they heard something shuffling their way from around the next corner. Maddock stopped moving and held out a hand. They p
aused and listened. The shuffling noise continued, like feet sliding across bare earth, moving leaf litter and cracking twigs.
Bones drew out his knife again, and the two men advanced.
Chapter 24
An old man hobbled around the corner. Maddock, after checking his hands to see that they were free of weapons, signaled Bones to stand down. Bones exhaled heavily and sheathed his knife.
The man, a local Haitian by the look of him, merely nodded and set about continuing on his way, giving the two Americans a wide berth. Maddock watched him walk for a few seconds but then decided he might know something about this place that could help them.
“Excuse me, sir?” He didn’t know if the man spoke English, but it was worth a try.
The elderly person shuffled to a stop and slowly turned around, shaking his head. “Leave me be. I got nothing you want.”
Maddock held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Relax, please. We’re not going to hurt you. We just wanted to ask you a few questions about this place...” He swept an arm up at Fort de Rocher, then decided he better follow up quick with something specific to engage the man.
“We’re looking into some of the legends that have been told about this island, the fort.”
The man’s look softened somewhat. “There are many legends.”
Bones, who had been looking more and more impatient, blurted out, “What about zombii?”
The old man moved to a lichen-covered rock and sat down. “I tell you what. There have always been instances of zombii, and not only humans. Animal zombii, too. But at some point in the last ten years they all disappeared. The human ones, anyway.”
Bones sat on the ground cross-legged in front of the man so as to be eye-to-eye. “Why did they disappear?”
The longtime local shrugged. “Folks disappear all the time. Tortuga is and has always been a hub for illegal migration, so it's expected that people will come and go, and sometimes disappear.”
