The Voodoo gang lord had to be dead. How could he not be?
“It is time to have some fun,” he said, a menacing grin contorting his gaunt face as he held up the utility knife. “Though I’m thinkin’ it won’t be so much fun for you.” He reached out his free hand, patted my chest fondly, then reached into the holster along my ribs, removing my pistol. He held it up, examining it as the light bounced of the black steel and the runic, acid-etched symbols. “A remarkable weapon,” he said, scrutinizing it more closely. “Dökkálfar made, no? I will relish using it to kill my enemies.”
Then, in a blink—not that I could blink, mind you—the gun disappeared, vanishing as he stowed the piece behind his back.
“Now,” he said, “where were we?” He tapped his bottom lip, his finger moving like the swaying antenna of a cockroach. “Ah, yes. I was going to say, I hope you are comfortable. Well, perhaps not comfortable, but hopefully not in a great deal of pain. The zombie powder, it is made from many, many different poisons”—he twirled the box cutter through the air absently, often only inches from my face—“crafted from human remains. From a rare tree frog native to these islands. Several different species of puffer fish. A toad, called bufo marinus. Many, many other things. If made incorrectly, it can cause indescribable pain. Even death.”
“But, I don’t want you dead.” He shook his head. “Not yet. And truly, I hope you feel no pain—not from the powder. No, I want you fresh.” He seemed to savor the word like a fine wine. “Fresh so you can experience what I have in store for you. If done right, zombie powder, it paralyzes the victim, creates symptoms that mirror death. There is no doctor here,” he said, “but if there were, he would give you a toe tag and send you on your way for an autopsy. But you are not dead, are you?” Once more his face filled my view.
“Oh no, you are not dead. You see, I am very good at makin’ the powder. I have done this thing many times, so I know how to get the mixture just so. You are alive, aware, and your nerve endings are fully functional.” His grin faded, died, and was reborn as a fierce rictus. He brought the knife to my face and pressed the tip of the blade into my flesh, just above my left eyebrow. A brief flare of pain zigzagged across the skin as hot blood welled on my forehead. “You can feel everything, but you are trapped inside your head.”
He pressed the blade down harder, then began to drag the razor down my forehead, cutting toward my eye.
TWENTY-THREE:
Eye for an Eye
He lifted the knife at the last moment, moved it onto my cheek, and went to work. Carving, slicing, butchering my face. The pain was terrible, overwhelming, like chewing on glass or walking over a board riddled with nails. The injury was a sharp living thing, radiating outward from my face, then spreading through my whole body. And I couldn’t stop him. I lay there, wide-eyed and silent as he gouged my cheek and forehead.
After another few excruciating minutes he lifted the knife, its edge wet and red with blood, the plastic utility guard decorated with small chunks of fresh gore. He leaned back a bit, lips pushed out, free hand stroking his pencil mustache as he considered his handiwork. “It is good,” he declared after a second, “not perfect, but very good, I think.” He reached over and grabbed a cracked hand mirror that was casually hanging out with the rest of the torture tools on the wooden table. “Would you like to see?” he asked, then promptly held the mirror out, positioning and repositioning the thing until my face stared back at me.
Three rough slashes adorned the left side of my face, running like jagged lightning bolts from my forehead down onto my cheek. Taken together, they looked like a trio of deep claws, almost identical to the old, puckered scars Beauvoir himself sported. “You like it?” he asked after a moment. “Now we are a matching pair,” he said, before lowering the mirror and bringing the knife back toward my face. The tip of the blade came to a slow halt half an inch from my left eye, the razor a thin point marring the horizon. “Well, almost a matching pair. Maybe I should finish, you think? Repay you for our shared history.”
I tried to fight against the effects of the powder—pushing every ounce of will and internal fortitude I had against the paralyzing agent. I couldn’t lay there and watch the sadistic prick carve out one of my friggin’ eyes. This wasn’t supposed to happen! I was the Hand of Fate, dammnit. I wasn’t supposed to be mutilated in the basement of a Haitian nightclub.
Then, almost as though Pa Beauvoir could hear my silent protest, the knife withdrew.
“No,” he finally said, “I think I’ll save that for the coup de grâce. Once I turn that eye into pulp, where could I go from there? Best to leave that for the end so you have something to look forward to. Let us start, instead, with the binding sigils. What do you think of dat?”
He turned away from me. “Bring the lamp over,” he commanded someone out of view. After a few seconds, one of the pallbearers from earlier wheeled over a squeaking halogen lamp like the kind they have in a dental office. Except this one had been modified: outfitted with dual mirrors, protruding from either side of the lamp, which allowed me to see my supine, lifeless body.
And holy shit, let me just say, I did look dead. My skin was pale, my chest didn’t rise, and my limbs were perfectly, unnaturally still. I’ve seen enough corpses to know one on sight, and I certainly qualified.
“That,” Beauvoir said, gesturing toward my face, “was a warm-up. Now for the real work. The powder, it won’t last much longer. The poison affects magi for only a little while. But it will be long enough for me to do what I must.” He pulled my shirt away from my body, the fabric tenting from the pressure, then took to it with the box cutter. The cloth parted with a whisper and a rustle, leaving my belly and chest exposed to the intense scrutiny of the halogen lamp above. He absently swatted away a fat cockroach that’d taken up residence on my belly, sending the portly bug flying across the room.
“Though torturing people is a hobby of mine, it is not the true purpose of zombie powder,” Beauvoir said, a professor taking to the podium. “The powder, it brings the body to the edge of death, a great precipice, and in so doing, weakens the bonds that tie the soul to flesh. That”—he slapped at my naked chest—“is its true purpose.”
Almost thoughtlessly, as though he’d done this same thing so damned often it had become pure muscle memory, he exchanged the box cutter for a more precise surgical scalpel and began to cut into my right pec. He no longer cavalierly sliced and diced, but rather traced a series of thin, swirling patterns, taking care only to part the skin, while leaving the muscle below intact. Imagine having your teeth smashed out with a hammer, one by one; that was the level of fiery pain.
“The human soul has two aspects,” Beauvoir said as he worked, “the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange. The first, it controls the body. It tells you to breathe and see, keeps the blood pumpin’ through your veins. But the second.” He paused, reaching out a hand and running it through my hair, the way you might pet a dog. “Well the second one is the mind. The spirit. It is what makes you, you, Yancy Lazarus. When you die, when we all die, the gros bon ange, the force anchoring soul to body, it withers. Dies. Then, like a bird taking flight, the ti bon ange flies free, abandoning the body for the world to come.
“But we Bokor, we can trap the spirit as it flees the flesh.” He ceased his cutting, reached out one hand, and pulled over a red earthen jar covered in flowing script. A glance in the mirror revealed that the image being so painstakingly etched into my body matched the voodoo sigils on the jar. “With a little preparation and skill, we Bokor can trap the ti bon ange in a witch-jar. But, the other half of the soul, the part responsible for body function, it remains behind.” He carefully set the jar back down out of view, then bent over and resumed his tedious and torturous work.
“When the powder wears off, the flesh, it recovers. Except now it is half a soul short. It becomes a meat puppet, a living zombie.” He finished his work—a strange cross on some sort of pedestal, flanked by a pair of boxy coffins. He set the knife d
own, then reached below the gurney, hands questing around for a long beat before finally fishing out a glass jar with some sort of viscous black liquid. As he unscrewed the metal lid, the smell of the jar’s contents hit me in the face like a punch to the nose: metallic, almost inky, combined with the sharp scent of alcohol.
He dipped one hand into the jar and scooped out a handful of the goop, thick as molasses, which he splatted onto the wound. He massaged the shit down deep, working it in with his bony fingertips. A fiery sting spread through the maze of lacerations like flaming gasoline. Beauvoir frowned, plucked off another bug, a big ol’ centipede, and flicked it away.
“A stain,” he explained, ignoring the insect completely. “It aids in recovery, prevents infection.”
The jar went down and the scalpel came back up.
He moved on to my belly, then, slicing into the taut skin running over my abs. A renewed wave of misery coursed through me, joining with the pain in my chest and face to form of choir of angry, screaming voices in my head. “You are an accomplished thug, Yancy Lazarus, this I know.” He turned his head so that the gaping hole in his face stared down on me. “So, it will give me great pleasure to turn you into my thug, heart and soul. Or half-soul. Like your pistol, which took my eye, you will become my weapon.
“Even better, the other half of your soul will serve me too. Wit’ your ti bon ange locked away in a witch-jar, I can siphon away your power, and with such strength flowing in me, I will grow into an unstoppable force. Me and my Chimeres, we will finally be strong enough to move beyond Cité Soleil. We will spread like a plague of the dead until we are in Carrefour and Pentionvill and Port-au-Prince. Until I can rule this country the way it should be ruled. My own private empire, and you will be at my right hand.”
He threw back his head and laughed, a booming rumble, full of hate, full of victory. When he glanced back down at me, tears streamed from his good eye while a trickle of dark blood oozed from his empty eye socket.
He finished with my stomach in quiet, rubbed on more of the black stain, then moved on to my left pec, humming some jaunty, upbeat tune as he carved.
And so it went: humming, cutting, staining, the butchery progressing in an efficient, workmanlike fashion. By the time he peeled off my coat and went to work on my left shoulder, I was starting to regain movement in my fingers and toes, just twitches, but growing stronger with every passing second.
Desperately, I worked to ignore the pain, ignore the fact that my upper torso now resembled a piece of Haitian wall art, as I worked to wiggle fingers and toes, hands and feet. I strained toward the Vis or the Nox or anything that might save me from more unbearable torment.
“The powder, it’s very weak now,” Beauvoir noted eventually, though I couldn’t tell you how long this involuntary tattoo session had lasted for. “I cannot dose you again, not without killin’ you. I’m almost done wit’ the work, but I want to make sure I get my eye while you still have the soul and mind to appreciate the pain.”
He set the scalpel down next to me, placing it by my face, then pulled out a silver melon baller with a rubber handle—the kind of thing you make fruit salad with—and a Zippo, slick silver with a tacky skull on the front. With a flick of his hand, he coaxed a flame from the lighter, then positioned the melon baller directly above the mini orange blaze, rotating and turning the tool until the scoop glowed a bright, angry red.
Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.
I knew exactly what he planned to do with that thing, and I wanted no part of it. Shit, put me back in the coffin with the bugs—literally anything would be better than what was coming down the pipe.
I threw everything I had into escape, desperately attempting to thrash my body while I screamed, hoping some survival instinct would kick in, granting me inhuman strength like in those stories where average moms lift minivans off of pinned children. My hands rose a few inches from the table and my lips twitched; a small squeal, hardly more than a whisper, escaped from my throat. But it wasn’t enough. Not even close to enough. If I had another ten minutes, maybe things would have been different, but I didn’t have another ten minutes.
I had ten seconds.
Panic enveloped me, raging in me like a tropical storm colliding into some small coastal town, ripping down buildings, uprooting trees, flipping over cars, flooding the roadways.
No. I tried to calm myself, to beat back the ugly dread threatening to overwhelm me. Someway, somehow, things would work themselves out. They had to.
Ferraro was out there somewhere, I reminded myself. Maybe I couldn’t save myself, but she could save me. Would save me. My mind latched onto that comforting platitude: Ferraro’s out there, she’ll come for me … Ferraro’s out there, she’ll come for me … Ferraro’s out there, she’ll come for me … She’d show up any minute, a machine gun in one hand, and a brilliant escape plan in the other. Sure, I’d walk away with a few unwanted tattoos, but I’d walk away with both eyes. Things would be fine. She’d come for me.
Beauvoir set down the lighter with a metallic clack, then leaned into me, slowly lowering the metal scoop toward my face, a centimeter at a time. Lowering it down and down, until I could feel the glowing heat on my skin.
Ferraro will come through, she’ll save me, she has to—
The world erupted in a pain so intense, so excruciating, there were no words for it. No metaphor capable of relating the hurt. It was all fire and death and hell, as half the world went dark, blinking out like a burst lightbulb. Somehow, amazingly, I forced out a single word, despite the zombie powder lingering in my system.
“FUUUUUUUUUCK!” Just one long, low groan.
Beauvoir pulled the melon baller away, the silver metal tarnished with red.
A second later the table beneath me shook and trembled.
For a heartbeat I thought it was just me—some strange new sensation riding the crashing waves of brutal pain—but then the torture implements next to me rattled, the click-clack of metal on metal. Felt like a small earthquake, but a whomp, far off in the distance—partially muted by the thick walls—said otherwise. Even zombified, half dead, and down one eye, I knew that sound: an explosion. Good-sized one, too.
The cavalry was on the way. That had to be it.
Except it was hard to care, hard to care if I lived or died. The pain was so awful, death seemed like the better option.
Heavy footfalls followed a moment later—
Someone descending the stairs from above.
“Baron,” came a frantic voice, liberally coated with French. “There been an attack. A bomb out front, at the police station. Zombie pieces are everywhere. And someone out there be using magic. Powerful magic. People are runnin’. It’s bad.”
Beauvoir set the melon baller down, his face contorted in a grimace of rage and hate. “What?” he asked, a growl of disapproval.
“An attack, Baron.”
Beauvoir’s spidery fingers curled into tight fists as he regarded me lying still once more. “Get this place on lockdown,” he said finally. “Marshall da troops, prepare for a counterassault. Now.” He turned toward the pallbearers—who I assumed were still present even if I couldn’t see them—and barked something harsh in French, then rounded on me. “We aren’t finished,” he snapped, rising to his feet. There was a flutter of movement as he spun then disappeared, followed by the angry clomp of feet storming upstairs.
Sterilize the wound. Azazel’s voice floated up from deep within me, a faint whisper, but present. Somehow, strange as it may sound, hearing that monster was a comfort. It meant I wasn’t alone. And, more importantly, it meant I had a powerful ally who could help me get even with Beauvoir, even if it came at a cost. I’ll help with the pain, the demon said. Immediately, a flood of sweet, numbing relief filled my empty socket, before trickling into the voodoo carvings decorating my torso and arms.
Sterilize. The. Wound. The words came again, this time a sharp command.
I struggled to comply and, surprisingly, found the strength to
lift my arms. Then my head. With a terrible surge of will I fought my way into a sitting position—the cuts in my abdomen flaring and throbbing even through whatever power Azazel was loaning me.
I pushed my shaky arms out behind me, steadying my frail body as my legs dangled over the edge of the gurney. I reached for the Vis, but still came up empty-handed. I glanced up, saw that I was alone, then caught a glimpse of myself in the cracked hand mirror on the table next to me and immediately wished I hadn’t. My left eye—or at least the place where my eye had been—was a friggin’ train wreck. An empty red wound, the skin charred and burnt, cauterized from the hot metal.
Oh fuck. Oh fuck, Oh fuck, fuck, fuck. My eye.
My limbs were cold and heavy and some rational part of my brain told me I was in shock, but that part of my brain seemed far away. Too distant to be of any use. I tentatively reached my fingers toward the butchered socket and the long jagged tears from the box cutter that extended above and below the god-awful wound. Before my fingers connected, however, I toppled forward, body slipping from the gurney as a geyser of vomit spewed from my mouth like Old Glory.
I landed on the floor, involuntarily rolled onto my back, and wound up staring at the mirror attached to the too-bright dental lamp. I threw up again and fainted, the shock and trauma finally overwhelming my brain. I hope I don’t drown in my vomit, I thought, then realized, maybe drowning in my own vomit might not be so bad after all.
TWENTY-FOUR:
Escape
“Holy Mary Mother of God.” The voice floated to me from a great distance filled with impenetrable gray fog. The speaker was female, her voice familiar, but I shoved the words away. “Yancy,” the speaker said, and then someone was shaking me gently, a strong hand grasping my shoulder. “A mannaggia,” she said. “I’ve got a pulse, but it’s weak and he’s in bad shape. Bad shape doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Savage Prophet: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode 4) Page 21
