Donald Westlake - High Adventure

“The last one,” Valerie said, tightening the final noose on the final neck.

“Good.”

The hurried work finished, Valerie for the first time had a chance to actually look at these things. She held a small statue in each hand, the identical little evil creatures capering there with the nooses around their necks. “These—” she said, and frowned. “Are you sure these are real?”

“Van parked there, in from the blacktop road. See it?”

She saw it, partway into the green jungle, white roof gleaming, front of the vehicle pointed west, away from the road. “This must be it!”

“And the visitors are here already.”

Valerie clutched tightly to the Zotzilaha Chimalmans as the plane banked and dropped low to the ground.

The sound of a passing plane was drowned by the chatter. Nine-millimeter bullets stuttered across the clearing, chopping Scottie’s legs out from under him and punching Vernon’s stomach three times, in a line just above his belt. People screamed and ran, and three villagers fell bleeding.

The plane was louder, not passing after all. Disturbed at their work, the false Gurkhas looked up as the plane roared through the clearing, sideways, right wingtip pointing down at them as though to say, “You. I see you.”

“Throw them!” Kirby yelled. “Throw them!”

Valerie was too busy to answer. She was lying on her side, against the side wall of the plane, elbow on the fixed part of the window. As quickly as she could, she pushed the little statues one at a time through the window flap.

Zotzilaha Chimalman. Out of the plane he fell, time after time, swathed in cotton material, the cloth pulling away in the breeze of his falling. The noose around his neck was made of four strings, tied to four edges of the cloth; enough of a parachute for such a little devil.

Two false Gurkhas lifted their Sterlings, but the plane was already through the clearing and gone, circling. The people were running into the jungle, the journalists lay flat in the sunlight. Creatures floated down out of the sky.

Cynthia made a hard, tight circle through the air, left wing straight up and right wing straight down, and once more she crashed through the clearing. More demons plummeted from her side.

A false Gurkha aimed his Sterling at one of the things parachuting toward him. He peered through the metal arch of the foresight protector, focusing on the gray-brown figure in the air. He recognized it. A great fright struck him and he stared, forgetting to shoot.

Vernon, curled in a tight ball around the agony in his stomach, wept, and blamed the Colonel for everything.

A false Gurkha clutched a statue out of the air, held it in his hand, stared at it in disbelief. Dirt clung to it, as though it had just come from the grave; some of the dirt was now on his hand. Suddenly, he flung the thing away. He thought his hand was burning. Stepping back, his foot rolled on a statue on the ground; it tried to trip him, bite him, bring him down. He shrieked, threw away his Sterling, and ran.

“There aren’t any more!” Valerie cried.

Kirby lifted Cynthia up and away. Valerie tried to see back to the village. “Wait! What’s happening back there?”

“Give them a minute to think about it. Then we’ll go back and see.”

What was this airplane? How had it come to be exactly where the false Gurkhas were, exactly at the moment when they were starting their work? Had they been betrayed? Were other enemies on the way?

These were the rational problems, the sensible questions, the meaningful dilemmas. They were as nothing beside the creatures hanging in the sky.

Twenty Zotzilahas floating down through the dappled air, falling one by one to the ground, gathering their cotton cloaks about themselves, grimacing and winking and grinning at the false Gurkhas, three more of whom flung away their guns and ran for the jungle.

“Come back!” the leader shouted, and fired after them, missing.

Another, backing away from the devils, saw the leader turn eyes and gun in his direction and he fired first, killing the leader 11 times.

Two more murderers in Gurkha uniform ran away into the jungle, these keeping their weapons.

Valerie stared back at the anonymous green. She wanted to see . Fretfully, she said, “Could they be that afraid of clay?”

“Their ancestors were.”

The false Gurkhas had been brought up in Christian homes. They had been taught to know and to love God and the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints. They had been taught to despise Satan and all his works. They had risen above such education, and struck out to live their own lives by their own rules.

No one had ever told them they had to believe in the Mayan gods and the Mayan devils. Those beings were there in the stories, that’s all, there in the drawings and the cloth designs and the carvings, there in the rites and ceremonies that a minority of their older relatives sometimes engaged in. Nobody had ever told them they had to believe in Zotzilaha Chimalman, and yet none of them had ever in his heart doubted that the cave of bats existed, the forked road to eternity existed, the evil hater of mankind was there in the darkness just waiting the opportunity to drag them down to eternal death.

He flies, Zotzilaha, he comes out of the sky like a bat. He is full of tricks and malevolence. If he catches you when your heart is black, you’re doomed.

When the sound of the plane was heard again in the clearing, there were only five false Gurkhas left in it, four living and their leader, who was dead. The dead one lay surrounded by images of Zotzilaha Chimalman.