“Yes,” said Seidelmann with mild amusement. “Squabbling, name-calling—all terribly productive. There ought to be some kind of minimum educational requirement before an individual is allowed to post anything online. A university degree at least.”
“Smart doesn’t always equal wise,” said Tartaglione.
“Yeah,” said Sampson. “I’ve heard of professors who’ve done really dumbass things. Like let their science projects get hijacked by psycho voodoo priests.”
Seidelmann huffed. “Point taken. I just hate to see wilful ignorance paraded so openly.”
“Radioactive,” said Pearce. He was suggesting that everyone seemed to be overlooking this salient word.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Buckler. “The guy is implying that NORAD has some sort of last-ditch nuclear failsafe built in. It blows itself up from the inside if there’s a fatal security compromise.”
“Is that true?” Lex asked.
“It’s way above my pay grade to know the answer to that. It’s possible, I guess. Main thing is, Deslorges read it and it must’ve struck a chord. He figures if NORAD has a nuclear device hidden somewhere inside, mightn’t Anger Reef too?”
“But Anger Reef doesn’t,” said Seidelmann. “I’d know if it did. I’d have been told, surely.”
“Would you, prof? The place spent ages out of action. It’s been sitting here doing nothing for a generation or more. I doubt there’s many people alive who were present when it was built, and in any case only a select few would have known there was a nuclear device on the premises. It would have been installed under conditions of utmost secrecy, and it wouldn’t be on any of the official blueprints. Somewhere buried in some archive there’ll be a record of its existence, but I’d be surprised if anyone in the current administration even knows about it. It’s an old secret, and old secrets get forgotten.”
“You’re saying you think this bomb thing might be true, chief?” said Morgenstern.
“It’s just conceivable.” Beneath his moustache, Buckler’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Anger Reef was, in its day, a highly sensitive site. It was slap bang in the middle of a Cold War flashpoint zone. They were paranoid times. Nobody’d want somewhere like this to fall into enemy hands if it could possibly be avoided. If that looked like happening, simplest course of action would be nuke the place, give the Soviets a pile of glowing rubble to sift through.”
“Be that as it may,” said Seidelmann, “even supposing there was a bomb once, it wouldn’t still be here. It would have been dismantled and removed as part of the decommissioning process.”
“Couleuvre seems to believe otherwise.”
“And he’s such a reliable source.”
“You worked with him, prof. You had a high opinion of him, ’til he turned you over and fucked you in the ass. You think he’s the type to go chasing after something that doesn’t exist?”
Seidelmann blustered but didn’t have an adequate answer.
“But what does he want with a nuke?” Morgenstern asked.
“What does anyone?” said Lex. “Terrorism. Blackmail. Something to sell on the black market. Delete where applicable.”
“Power,” said Albertine.
“Yes, that pretty much sums it up: power. With a nuke, Couleuvre’s no longer just any old bokor. He’s the biggest, baddest bokor of all time.”
“The sorcerer supreme,” said Sampson.
“He would have death in his hands, too,” said Albertine. “The ability to kill on a widespread scale. That would curry great favour with Baron Samedi. He could offer the Baron thousands and thousands of souls. The ultimate act of worship, a mass sacrifice.”
Everyone exchanged looks. The temperature in the room, already low, seemed to drop a few degrees more.
“He really has to be stopped,” Lex said. “Now, before it can go any further.”
“You heard the man, Thirteeners,” said Buckler. “Lock and load. Mission just hit critical. There’s a madman with his eye on a thermonuclear prize. Let’s go ruin his day.”
TWENTY-NINE
COLD WAR LEGACY NIGHTMARE
PROFESSOR SIEDELMANN HAD described seeing Papa Couleuvre searching for something on Sublevel 3. It stood to reason that the nuclear device, if there was one, would be located there. The purpose of any bomb would be to obliterate Anger Reef entirely, and that could be best achieved by detonating it at the deepest point available. The force of the explosion would be channelled upwards through the installation, undermining even as it was cremated. A sun-hot fireball would erupt below ground but little if any of the blast would escape to the surface. The entire island would collapse neatly in on itself, sinking beneath the waves. Anger Reef would vanish in an instant, as if it had never been, like a poor man’s Atlantis.
The more Lex considered it, the more plausible the presence of a bomb on site seemed. It was a scorched earth policy typical of the Cold War era, when both power blocs on either side of the Iron Curtain were desperate not to give their opponent an inch. Should the Russians have rumbled the presence of a listening post on Anger Reef, and perhaps made an aggressive move against it, the Americans were in a position to dispose of it literally at the touch of a button. All personnel would evacuated, and then ka-boom. Ha ha, Ivan. Installation? What installation? Gone would be all that high-tech radar and sonar equipment, far more sophisticated than anything the Russians possessed and therefore of great interest to their scientists and engineers. Gone without a trace. Every last scrap of evidence flushed away. A Pyrrhic victory maybe, but a victory nonetheless. In Cold War logic a loss could still be counted as a win, so long as it meant the other superpower did not win either.
It had been an insane age, geopolitically. Was the world any saner now? Not much, Lex thought. Nor much safer.
And if Couleuvre was on the money and Anger Reef did come fitted with a nuclear failsafe, the levels of global danger were in no way going to be diminished. This was yet another of those Cold War legacy nightmares, like the nukes that disappeared on a regular basis from airbases and naval yards belonging to the former Soviet Union and wound up in the hands of very insalubrious regimes and organisations. Lex had personal experience on that front, having once gatecrashed just such a transaction in a mountain pass in the higher reaches of the Hindu Kush, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. A renegade Ukrainian colonel had been attempting to sell a single eighteen-megaton warhead from an R-36 missile to a jihadist group. Before the briefcase containing five million dollars in bearer bonds could change hands, however, a rocket-propelled grenade landed in the middle of the gathering and put paid to their dreams, whether ideological or financial. Clean shots from an L115A3 sniper rifle picked off the injured and dying, after which Lex called in a covert US Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team to retrieve the warhead, render it safe and whisk it off to the Pantex facility in Amarillo, Texas, for disassembly. He wouldn’t forget in a hurry the looks on the faces of all the participants, seen through the reticle crosshairs of the RPG launcher: the sheer avarice in everyone’s eyes, while a weapon of mass destruction lay snug in the back of a nearby Land Cruiser, poised to become an atrocity.
That had been a job he would have done for free, if asked. And he was beginning to feel the same way about the present mission. All at once, there was more at stake than the threat posed by a regiment of zuvembies. Far more. Papa Couleuvre had morphed from bogeyman to potential mass-murdering monster, and Lex had dealt with enough of those to know that they deserved no mercy, no quarter, nothing but the same primal revulsion and loathing you felt for a hornet or a scorpion. They needed to be swatted, stamped on, crushed, before they could do more harm.
The door to the staircase beckoned. Tartaglione, at the head of the group, was just a few metres from it.
Then Lex heard shuffling. The sound of feet clumsily dragging. From behind him.
He turned. They all turned.
Zuvembies.
A good dozen of them.
They were marching down the passa
ge, three abreast. Their pale dull eyes were fixed on the group of living beings. Interlopers, as they saw them. The enemy. They moved with deadly purpose, stiff-jointed but determined, their menace unmistakable.
The merest moment of panic. An involuntary pause for shock, for taking stock.
Then Buckler cried, “Hostiles! Move! Move!”
Lex, Albertine, Seidelmann and the Thirteeners scrambled away from the oncoming zuvembies, making for the door.
Which opened.
To reveal more zuvembies.
THIRTY
TRIPLE-PRONGED ASSAULT
IT WAS ALMOST, but not quite, a pincer movement. Had the staircase zuvembies emerged a couple of seconds sooner, they and their passage counterparts would have successfully trapped their quarry between them. Lex and company would have been bookended by the two contingents, boxed in with no room for manoeuvre, and would have been besieged on two fronts at once.
As it was, Tartaglione had drawn level with the door when it opened, and his reactions were quick. He shot the frontmost zuvembie in the chest with his CAR-15. The zuvembie staggered backwards under the impact, colliding with another zuvembie behind. Without hesitating, Tartaglione grabbed the door and slammed it shut. He grasped the handle and held it level, at the same time shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”
Everyone else hurried past while Tartaglione kept a tight grip on the handle. The zuvembie on the other side was pushing down on it. The undead creature was visible through the window slit inset into the door, straining and thrusting, teeth bared. Blood oozed from a neat hole in its sternum.
“Fucker’s strong!” Tartaglione said, grimacing with effort. It was all he could do to keep the handle horizontal. “Can’t hold it... much...”
Then a fist smashed through the safety glass. The hand, belonging to another zuvembie, grabbed Tartaglione’s collar. It yanked him towards the door. His head jammed into the broken window slit.
Sampson ran to his side and began pulling his free arm. Tartaglione, yelling, frantic, was the rope in a bizarre tug of war.
Meanwhile the first set of zuvembies was closing in.
Morgenstern shouldered her carbine and started firing at them. Hunks of flesh flew away, but the zuvembies didn’t falter. They lumbered on, remorseless. One of Morgenstern’s bullets severed a spinal column. The zuvembie collapsed on the spot, but its comrades just booted it aside and carried on. The semi-paralysed zuvembie didn’t give up either but clawed its way along the floor, useless legs trailing.
Sampson and Tartaglione were both doing their utmost to resist the zuvembie’s grip on Tartaglione’s collar, but even their combined strength was no match for its unholy might. They were losing the battle. Tartaglione was being dragged head-first through the window, even as he still struggled to keep the door shut.
“Give me a second,” Sampson said. “I’m letting go.”
“You’re what now?” Tartaglione exclaimed. “Don’t you do that. Don’t you fucking dare.”
“Chill. I’ve got a plan.”
“It better be a fucking good one.”
Sampson unhitched the KA-BAR knife from his belt and brandished it point down. “Get your stinking paws off my buddy, asshole,” he roared, and plunged the blade into the zuvembie’s wrist. Sawing and levering, he swiftly separated hand from arm. Blood glugged from the stump in sticky rivulets. Tartaglione sprang free, the zuvembie’s fist still clamped to his clothing. His head was bleeding freely from gashes inflicted by the broken window glass.
“Fall back!” Buckler yelled to both men, and Tartaglione and Sampson reeled away from the door just as the first set of zuvembies reached them. They bundled down the passage, ducking under the suppressing fire that Morgenstern was continuing to lay down. Tartaglione was dazed and bleeding. Sampson was supporting him, half-carrying him.
“But those are people,” Albertine protested as they ran. “We shouldn’t be shooting them.”
“Were people,” Buckler corrected her. “They’re dead. They just don’t act like it. And as long as they’re going balls-out to kill us, yes, we should be shooting at them.”
Pearce, ahead, skidded to a halt. “Motherfucking...”
Yet more zuvembies had come into view. They tramped along the passage, an assortment of civilians, some in casual dress, a couple in lab coats, one in a chef’s uniform, another in a janitor’s coveralls. The chef was carrying a meat cleaver, the janitor a broken-off broom handle with a sheared, splintered tip. Their mouths hung slack but their eyes had the same yellow cast and the same bleak fixity as those of the zuvembies at the other end of the passage.
The pincer movement had just graduated to a triple-pronged assault.
“Fire at will,” Buckler ordered, and he and Pearce opened up. Buckler’s M-60 clattered. Pearce’s MP-5 barked. Lex joined in with his SIG. Morgenstern was still blasting away in the opposite direction with her CAR-15, a one-woman rearguard action. Albertine, Seidelmann, Sampson and Tartaglione were sandwiched in between.
The air was torn by the cacophony of gunfire. Bullets pounded into the zuvembies in torrents, but had pitifully little effect. They weren’t stopping them. They were barely even slowing them. The zuvembies slogged onward, relentlessly narrowing the gap at either end. Some of them were whittled away to rags and ribbons, but whatever unnatural force animated them refused to let them lie down. It propelled them stubbornly on. A shattered leg? The zuvembie would hop. Both legs ruined? Crawl. Even when rendered headless, the creatures were undeterred. A cockroach would have envied their imperviousness to damage.
As Buckler paused to reload, Sampson stepped up to take his place.
“I’m thinking grenade,” he said.
“And I’m thinking that’s a no-go,” said Buckler. “At this range? Passage would channel the blast as blowback. Every chance we’d frag ourselves too.”
“Then what’s the plan, boss?”
“The plan is we keep firing ’til there’s either none of them left or none of us.”
“Guess that’ll have to do.”
The group was bunched tight, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, and now the zuvembies were just a few paces away, a mere metre or so. The nearest ones sprang, hurling their bullet-ripped bodies at the living humans.
Pearce found himself grappling with the chef, fending off blows from the meat cleaver. In life, the chef had been a corpulent man. Much of his blubber had been flayed off by the volleys of bullets, but he still wobbled massively as he swung the cleaver at Pearce. His flabby arm worked like a piston, descending again and again. Pearce blocked with one arm, all the while pumping rounds from his machine pistol into the zuvembie’s belly. Viscera slithered out, but the chef neither noticed nor cared. He hacked mechanically, methodically, bit by bit wearing Pearce down, hammering away at his defences.
Finally he got through. The cleaver bit into Pearce’s shoulder, and the laconic Thirteener let out a jagged cry of pain.
The chef withdrew the cleaver and pulled back his arm to deliver a fresh blow.
Incensed, as if he couldn’t believe what the chef had just done, Pearce launched himself at him. He grabbed the cleaver and wrested it out of the zuvembie’s grasp. Then he returned the favour by whacking the chef with the cleaver seven or eight times, sinking the blade deep into the zuvembie’s ample flesh. He would have carried on until the chef was just so much chopped mince, had the janitor not attacked too. Suddenly Pearce was looking down at his own stomach and at the snapped-off broom handle that had been thrust into him to a depth of several inches.
“Sneaky,” he mumbled, then fell.
At the other side of the group, Morgenstern was swamped by zuvembies. They were too close for the carbine to be of practical use any more, so she resorted to her handgun. She shot the zuvembies in the centre of their body mass, as she’d been trained, but more in hope than expectation of a positive result. The semiauto’s clip was rapidly expended, and then the zuvembies were all over her, clawing, clutching, hauling her down.
; Sampson leapt to her assistance. He wrenched zuvembies off her, to the accompaniment of some highly creative swearing. But with each zuvembie he sent flying, another rose to take its place. They swarmed in, their numbers overwhelming. Soon Sampson was as beleaguered as Morgenstern was. Lex watched him struggling valiantly to stay upright, sinking beneath a tide of ravaged limbs, contorted hands and silently impassive faces.
“Lex, oh God, it’s hopeless,” said Albertine.
“There must be something we can do. Your vodou. Can you use it on these things?”
“Yes, if there weren’t so many of them, if I had the time...”
Time, Lex had to admit, was the one thing they did not have. “Then we’ll just have to make do with guns,” he said.
Pearce, Sampson and Morgenstern seemed lost, as good as dead. Only Lex, Buckler, Albertine, Seidelmann and Tartaglione remained standing, and Tartaglione was in bad shape. Half his face was masked with blood, and he was weakened and on the brink of lapsing into shock. That he was still with the group at all was thanks to Sampson. As for Seidelmann, he was cowering behind Buckler, wringing his hands. “I knew it,” he intoned. “I knew we should never have come down here. It was madness. I said so. I said.”
“Prof,” snarled Buckler, “if you don’t shut the fuck up, so help me I’ll kill you myself.”
“Go ahead. Do it. Put me out of my misery. At least it’ll be quick.”
“Don’t tempt me. If I didn’t need every last round of ammo...”
A zuvembie broke past Buckler and made a lunge for Lex. Lex whipped his SIG up, lodged the barrel against the creature’s mouth, and gave it some radical root canal surgery.
The slide on the gun locked back. Clip empty. And the zuvembie, jaw hanging by just a few shreds of skin and tendon, clamped both hands onto Lex’s head and began twisting. Lex felt the unearthly power radiating through the thing’s cold, dank skin. Its touch was repugnant. The zuvembie was attempting to break his neck. He could hear—feel—his own vertebrae creaking. He fought back, jabbing a thumb into the creature’s eyeball; smashing its nose; tearing its ear. But those were standard defensive moves, effective against men, not monsters. They meant nothing to a zuvembie.
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