Michael Slade - Headhunter

Both Spann and Scarlett tensed. Something was going to happen.

With one hand still to her head, her jaw now working under her hollow face, the woman-possessed slouched toward the man who held the knife. There was something untouchable about her, as though she really wasn't present. Enigmatically she mumbled to herself, her voice slurring the words until they were meaningless. At the tomb she stopped to bend over and kiss its stone. She groped in her hair and tied knots in it until the old hag who still sat on top whispered something down to her.

The woman nodded and flicked her tongue like a snake.

Then turned slowly and began to approach once more the man who held the knife. She was swinging her hips from side to side and flouncing her breasts as she walked. Stopping directly in front of him, she mocked the man with her body. She placed her arms around his neck and hung there provocatively. She rubbed her body against him until he slapped her to the ground. Then laughing aloud she knelt at his feet and began clawing the earth. The man struck her four blows with the side of the machete, knocking her onto her back. She tried to rise but he struck her again, even harder this time. The woman merely laughed. She went to rise again, but the man put the point of the machete to her belly and forced her back down to the ground. In a jeering manner he smeared the blade over her breasts and arms. He must have cut her, Spann thought, for the woman let out a cry —

And that was when the clutching hand burst up out of the earth.

The second time the woman shrieked, Scarlett jerked involuntarily. The grasping fingers of the zombi were now entangled in her hair.

Clods of earth began to erupt as the buried man tried to break out of his prison under the ground.

The woman's head was being yanked back and forth as a hole opened in the earth and the man with the machete carved an X across her trembling stomach.

The old crone smiled.

Then one by one, the naked women with the red cloth bags removed the masks from their faces and placed them at the feet of the Voodoo Queen. For each mask delivered the matriarch gave to her subject a small hoodoo doll. Pins stuck out of each doll, glinting in the moonlight.

Thump… thump… thump…

The drums began again.

Then the zombi came out of the ground.

First the earth broke away from around him in large chunks and clods. Then his head popped up all smeared with mud, his eyeballs vacant and bulging and dull, his voice groaning out broken noises from deep down in his throat. He bit the screaming woman and tossed her to one side.

By now the old women with the red cloth bags had joined the dancers around the fire. The air was filled with booms and rattles and whistles and chants and passionate wails and whines. As their skeletal, wrinkled, empty-breasted bodies began to shiver to the drums, the old women worked the dolls with their hands, jabbing them with the pins.

John Lincoln Hardy, bone still in hand, walked to one end of the tomb. A hinge squealed as he pulled open a stone door. With his free arm he reached inside.

The zombi was out of the ground.

He stood in the moonlight, motionless, his arms held limply out from the sides of his body.

Gyrating abruptly on one foot, the man with the machete strode grandiosely over to the fire dancers. A few of them were now slapping their necks out of time with the drums

Still dancing, the group surrounded him — and even the woman whom the zombi had bitten ran to join the crowd. Then the man with the knife whirled savagely and sliced out at the air, missing the dancers by inches as each powerful stroke came down.

John Lincoln Hardy walked over and cut the carcass of a goat down from one of the gibbets. To do this it appeared to Scarlett that Hardy used the end of the bone still clutched in his hand. Then a moment later he saw the attachment screwed into one knobbed end. It was a razor-sharp sickle about four inches in length. Like a silver eye, the steel winked in the moonlight.

Hardy returned to the tomb once more, and this time when he reached in, pulled out a wooden crate on rollers. From this crate he dragged another goat by the horns.

As Hardy struggled to get the animal over to the scaffold, the zobop with the machete knocked each dancer to the ground. They lay in a circle like hour strokes around the edge of a clock, each naked body on its back with its feet to the gallows pole.

Finished, the zobop joined Hardy. Together they dragged the goat, bleating and struggling, between two of the supine figures. Then hoisting the animal up, they hung it by its horns. The goat was left thrashing about, fear riveting each eye.

Hardy passed the bone with the sickle attachment to the zobop and returned to the tomb. After a nod from the old woman he began to collect the masks, stuffing each one carefully into a large black bag. Spann wondered if that was the same bag as the one for Damballah the Snake. The thought, however, was snapped off when she heard the unearthly gibberish of an animal unhinged by pain.

Her eyes jerked to the gallows.

The zobop had handed the zombi the bone with the sickle on the end. The zombi's arms were red. The sharp silver crescent of the sickle was streaked with dripping blood. The zombi — once given the weapon and the order — had staggered over to the hanging goat and ripped its belly open. A mass of raw viscera had tumbled out of the gaping wound. The thin legs of the animal were now jerking and quivering, kicking the gray cords of intestine that dangled down to the ground. The goat turned on the scaffold as the moon shone down.

Even at a distance, Scarlett and Spann could see into the red maw of the cleaved belly where glossy tubular glands and bulgy membranes slid about, the entrails still palpitating. The screams of the animal were now climbing to a terrible pitch. It was like a wild cry that burst up and out until something in the tortured throat tore, and the wail trailed away to the hiss of a hoarse whisper.

The zombi reached into the cavity and pulled out the animal's guts. Then slowly the Undead creature began to drape the ropes of steaming intestine across the upturned faces of the voodoo dancers circled on the ground around the scaffold.

"Damballah," someone whispered, barely audibly.

Rick Scarlett felt light-headed. Nearby a fly buzzed, its sound a little too loud.

The goat jerked and died.

As the stretched-out dancers covered with gore now began to writhe in ecstasy, the two cops turned and looked toward the tomb.

Only then did they realize that John Lincoln Hardy had disappeared. With the bag over one shoulder, he had been swallowed into the grave of night like a stone sucked into quicksand.

Rick Scarlett tapped Katherine Spann on the shoulder.

"Let's get the fuck out of here," he whispered into her ear.

Less than a minute later, they too were gone.

10:35 a.m.

Banks of cloud swept north from the Gulf and the tropics. When the ball of the storm finally cracked open, a white flash of wavering light filled the horizon, showing up each leaf, each twig, each bough on the trees in stark black relief. An emphatic crash of thunder followed shortly after. As the storm drew closer to Moisant Field each lightning blitz was yellower than the last, each volley of thunder succeeding it at shorter intervals. Ultimately the brilliance and the noise met in one consummate explosion right above their heads — and the rain came down. The hood of the police car rumbled like a roll of military drums. For Scarlett and Spann the downpour made them both feel right at home.

Ten minutes later the rain stopped and Ernie Hodge, head ducked, lumbered out through the Air Express door of the cargo building.