It was a long night. The cold gray dawn brought rain and a little sanity as the survivors surveyed the damage. Utopiaton had gotten off a lot lighter than the Caribs and their zombie allies. The captured zombie died just before dawn, staring blankly and muttering something about its mother while Captain Gringo tried to question it. The ones hung up on the wire had been caught in a lot of cross fire and were all dead by the time the villagers moved gingerly out to gather them. The wet grass was liberally sprinkled with dead Caribs, too. It made for a grisly line of corpses while some peones dug a mass grave across the tracks and under the cover of Pedro’s gun.
Padre Hernando insisted on giving the last rites to the enemy dead, pagan Caribs and whatever the zombies were, alike. It came as no great surprise to Captain Gringo that the priest and villagers failed to identify any of the bodies. He didn’t hang around to see them buried. Gaston had send a messenger from the infirmary.
What was left of it.
He found Gaston and Colonel Gage staring morosely down at the splintered wreckage of one whole wing of the infirmary. Gaston looked up and said, “Willie May and Lilly Belle. They must have been in the doctor’s office. You’re not going to believe who must have simply walked in on them, holding a lit dynamite bomb.”
Captain Gringo stepped around a pile of debris Gaston indicated and swallowed hard. The lower half of Prudence Lee would have simply been that of a tall black woman to anyone who hadn’t known her rather well. The rest had been blown to bits. The grotesquely twisted, still shapely legs attached to the shattered pelvis looked like an obscene parody of giant frog legs, lightly fried. A shoe with a human foot still in it lay in the red mud a few feet beyond. Gaston said, “Willie May wore shoes like that. The rest of her and Lilly Belle are sort of mixed with everything, but there are features here and there one can recognize.”
“What about the other colored girl?”
“Susan? She was with us in the warehouse. She seems a bit upset, but I can get her, if you think it’s worth talking to her.”
Captain Gringo said, “Forget it. If she wasn’t here, she doesn’t know anything.”
Colonel Gage said, “It’s ghastly. It’s unreal. First that Mamma Macumba vanishes from her coffin. Then she comes back with a bomb and blows everything to smithereens! How on earth do they do it?”
Captain Gringo shrugged and said, “I don’t know. The guys we found on the wire are going to surprise the shit out of me if they get up again. They look like they’ve been drugged to the eyebrows, and some of ’em took a lot of killing. But this time they bled real blood.”
“What about the black girl and the Irish lass in Lloyd’s grave?”
“Yeah, what about ’em? I just looked Mab over. She was just plain dead. I’d say she was poisoned. We re-buried her. As for Prue over there, she might have walked in with that bomb. Somebody might have just tossed her body in, on top of it. She’s in no shape to tell us now.”
“Dash it all, we know she escaped from her coffin, don’t we?”
“No sir, we don’t. She might have been in some kind of trance. She might have really been dead and somebody snatched the body on us.”
“Ridiculous! The others would have seen anyone mucking about with her closed coffin!”
“They’d have seen her open it and climb out, too. And Willie May tended to be excitable. Don’t you suppose she’d have mentioned it?”
Gaston considered and said, “I like the doctor, Lloyd. If one must worry about missing dead people, I can’t think of anyone more likely to be useful to a witch doctor than a real doctor, hein?”
Colonel Gage sputtered, “See here, damn it, I saw Lloyd die. I was at his funeral. I saw him buried.”
Captain Gringo said, “I’ll take your word for that, Colonel. But he sure as hell wasn’t in his grave the last time we looked. He had a lot of drugs at his disposal, too. We’d better keep an open mind about Lloyd.”
“Good God, are you suggesting he’s out there alive in the jungle, plotting more black magic?”
“Somebody sure is. Let’s get a head count and see if anyone else we know is missing.”
He spotted Webster crossing the green with a quartet of guards and hailed them over. Webster was pale and looked like he’d had a hard night. Captain Gringo said, “I want a detail here to clean up this mess and bury what’s left of the girls. Do you really need those guys?”
Webster said, “Rather. We’re under siege and I’m not very handy with a gun.”
“Hell, by now the Caribs are halfway home. That rush last night was a last ditch effort to stop us from starting our sanitary cordon, and it didn’t work. Pappa Blanco won’t want any of his people caught on our side of the deadline. Stick with us if you’re nervous.”
Webster said, “Righto, tight as a tick and all that. But what’s next on the agenda, old bean?”
“Head count. Couple of Creoles and some glass were hit by stray shots over in the native quarter, but nobody on our side was killed or seriously hurt. Gaston here, says everyone holed up with him in the warehouse made it, and Pedro’s guys guarding the rail yard only had one guy lightly creased.”
“Then why do we have to call the roll? All present and accounted for, eh what?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t even know half the company men on sight and Padre Hernando is missing a couple of Creoles.”
“Are you suggesting the Caribs slipped in and carried off some of our people?”
Captain Gringo stared soberly at the ruins of the infirmary and said, “No. We shot the piss out of the guys trying to move in from the jungle. Some son of a bitch working inside our lines blew this place up. A Black Carib is just a mixed breed wearing no pants. A Creole is just a native who says he goes to Church. Pappa Blanco has confederates moving back and forth.”
“Good Lord, cannibal intelligence agents?”
“That’s about the size of it. They know about our plan to seal them off. They’ve been moving corpses around like peas under a carnival shell. So let’s line everybody up and start asking questions.”
He turned and ordered the guards to get to work on the ruins. Gaston waited until he was finished before he nudged Captain Gringo and said, “Dick, the colonel and M’sieu Webster can record the details of who was with whom, doing what. I will feel more like playing policeman once I run a perimeter patrol. So, with your permission, my old and rare ...”
Captain Gringo glanced up at the pale sun peeking back at them through the gray rain clouds and said, “When you’re right you’re right. I think they’re long gone, but we’d better make sure.”
He turned to Colonel Gage and added, “You and Webster here, get a picture of where everyone was last night on paper. Gaston and I are going to take a tractor out for a drive in the country.”
Colonel Gage frowned and asked, “Since when have you been giving the orders around here, damn it?”
“You want to patrol the jungle while Gaston and I count noses here?”
“Well, since you put it that way.”
Captain Gringo took Gaston, Gordo and Pedro along with two machine guns and plenty of ammo aboard the mammoth steam tractor. They chugged out along the trackside trail, expecting to find the narrow gauge tracks torn up. But the tracks were still there, gleaming wetly in a soft drizzle that had set in for/the morning.
They came to the first sugar field. It was a black carpet of char, steaming wetly. The next one was the same. Gaston said, “Ridiculous. I thought you said this Pappa Blanco was an old hand at guerrilla warfare, Dick.”
“I did. I expected them to tear up the tracks, too.”
“Tres bush league. Why burn crops that grow back like weeds while one ignores expensive installations?”
“Maybe to spare the expense of rebuilding them? The colonel says Pantropic is about to give the island up as a lost cause. I doubt like hell that the Caribs have any need of a rail network across a third of the island. So the scam has to be a takeover.”
“Perhaps. But you cabled Wall Street and no other sugar company has shown interest in Nuevo Verdugo, hein?”
“Yeah. How about that? United Fruit isn’t bidding either. I cabled New Orleans. United Fruit looked into conditions here before Pantropic rented it from the Crown. They say it’s a lousy place to grow bananas.”
“Perhaps. But big businessmen have been known to fib, Dick.”
“So what else is new? But Nuevo Verdugo is a lousy place to grow bananas. The island’s half rock and Pan-tropic was advised against its sugar operation by old hands who know this part of the world. Some know-it-alls in London rammed the project through without ever looking at the place. As a crown colony the island has never shown a profit, so the rent is cheap. Pantropic’s ninety-nine year lease would be a bargain, if only they could grow something here.”
They smashed through some brush and started chugging across another expanse of ash. Captain Gringo asked Gordo about the buried roots of the burned off cane and Gordo said, “Si, my Captain. The sugar will sprout back in a week or so. One plants cane by ditching in lengths of rootstock saved from the previous crop. These fires will have burned off all the insects and weed seeds, too. I agree Pappa Blanco has most peculiar ideas about destruction. He kills peones and cane, but both are easily replaced.”
“I’ll have to point that out to the colonel when we get back.”
Gaston nudged him and said, “If we get back, Dick! Over there, near the tree line. What the devil is it?”
Captain Gringo stopped the tractor out on the charred field and raised his field glasses. A human figure stood in an odd position between two scorched tree trunks. He lowered the glasses and said, “One of the workmen who didn’t make it to our rescue train. They’ve impaled him on a gumbo limbo stake.”
“He’s dead?”
“Wouldn’t you be dead with a sapling in your ass and out your mouth? I hope they had the decency to kill him first, but I doubt it. They seem to be trying to send us a message.”
Pedro asked, “What is the message, Captain Gringo?”
“They don’t like us. But we can’t leave that guy there like that.”
He opened the throttle and drove toward the tree line at an angle. Gaston said, “That impaled body is the other way, Dick.”
“I know. You’re going to have to switch places with me once we hit cover. I’m dropping off with one of the Maxims. Do I have to draw you a picture?”
Gaston grinned and said, “Merde alors, I was at this game before you were born. One gathers you wish much smoke as well as noise?”
“You’re learning. Pedro, empty your canteen on some of the greener sticks and shove them in the firebox when I drop off.”
Gaston took the throttle and wheel, speeded up, and said, “Gordo, brace that other machine gun in line with our boiler and get ready to commence fire.”
“Señor Gaston. I know how for to shoot a machine gun, but I don’t know how for to hit anything with it.”
“Sacre Goddamn! Who can expect to hit anything in the middle of a tossed salad? Do as you are told.”
The tractor nosed into the brushy tree line and Gaston swung the wheel hard over as Captain Gringo dropped off the far side with the other Maxim cradled in his arms. He hit running and headed for a fallen log in the forest gloom as, behind him, all hell broke loose.
Gaston drove up the tree line, one big spiked wheel out in the open while the other smashed the growth edging the field and Gordo fired blindly ahead at the falling tree tops. Gaston cut a fifty foot gap, swung out in the open, then swung back to chew up some more greenery before whirling around and churning out to the middle of the field, gun silent. The tractor drove in a circle, raising a cloud of ash, then suddenly tore back toward the trees, machine gun flashing as if Gaston had suddenly spotted something. From behind his log, even Captain Gringo had to admit the guys on the tractor looked like they’d gone a little crazy.
The Caribs must have thought so too. They’d been set to ambush a foot patrol coming across the open field to retrieve its dead. A mechanical monster driven by an obvious maniac had not figured in their plans. So, as Gaston hit the tree line on the far side of the impaled body and proceeded to knock down trees and spray lead with abandon, they did what any other sensible cannibals would have done. They started moving away from all the wild excitement, hugging the tree line where the brush was thickest and the cover best.
There were a dozen of them, naked save for strands of sea shells, but packing Remington repeaters. They retreated in good order and with more grudging common sense than panic. They came to the messy gap Gaston had made with his first apparently wild dive into the jungle. Their leader grinned and pointed. Captain Gringo watched while they darted across the gap and stopped to take cover behind the jackstrawed timber the leader had spotted as a likely place to make a stand. The Caribs crouched and got set for the oncoming tractor with their rifles braced across fallen logs. They had no way of knowing they’d presented an open flank to Captain Gringo until he rose with the Maxim braced against his hip and opened fire!
It was like having them in a bowling alley. As the machine gun sprayed them, some rose right into his hosing lead. Others tried hugging the ground, but he simply had to drop the muzzle between bursts to spatter them. The recoil rode the gun up with each short savage burst and Captain Gringo used that to good advantage as he watered his garden of spurting blood until, unlike other gardens, it stopped growing.
His ears still rang when he lowered the smoking muzzle. But he heard the sound of chugging machinery and falling trees. So he ran out in the open to keep from getting run over or shot by mistake. As he passed the line of dead Caribs he recognized a couple from the clearing where they’d tried to feed him to that snake. It made him feel better about the guts and brains spattered all over the logs where they lay.
Gaston spotted him, swung out of the tree line and stopped the tractor. When he climbed aboard, he saw they’d pulled the dead man off the stake and lashed his stiff body to the tender box. He told Gaston, “It worked. We nailed a squad of the bastards, but they were all natives.”
“One expected to encounter Queen Victoria, my old and rare friend?”
“No, but I was hoping to nail the son of a bitch who wants her colony. But I think Pappa Blanco has pulled in his horns for now. The moron leading those guys was a wild type I saw by Prue’s cave. He was jerking off then too. I’d say the main bunch has pulled back for now, and we’re pretty far from town. Let’s head back. I want to start that sanitary cordon before noon. We’ll pick up a good crew and use the rails to carry the tractors and gear most of the way. We can bull through to the narrows and use the results as a road later.”
Gordo said, “Forgive me, my captain, but it will soon be time for La Siesta.”
“Let me put it this way, Gordo. Would you rather work in broad daylight or fight off attacks like we had last night?”
Gordo sighed and said, “Screw La Siesta. It is a rather old-fashioned tradition in any case, now that I think about it.”