Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer

With a high-pitched snarl Tigerishka launched herself at him, drove him against the wall with one forepaw around his throat and the other poised like a four-tined rake a foot above his face.

“That is a damnable lie, Paul Hagbolt!” she said in flawless English. “I demand that you take it back at once!”

He got his breath. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said, smiling at her, though there were bright tears dripping from his eyes. “You’re scared to death.”

Don Guillermo Walker slapped mosquitoes and stared at the flooded housetops of San Carlos red in the dawn as the launch beat its way back into Lake Nicaragua. During the night the current in the San Juan River had once more reversed itself, opposing the launch strongly, and now it was clear this was because the lake itself had risen a dozen feet or more — though why that happened was harder to say.

The sky presented a mystery, too. To the east it was clear, the sun already shooting his rays hotly, but to the west a thick white cloud-wall rose from the strip of land between the lake and the Pacific and extended as far north and south as one could see.

Although night before last he had witnessed the great outburst of volcanism, it did not occur to Don Guillermo that here, as along many other stretches, the Pacific Ocean was bordered now by a steam curtain, where seawater was flowing into volcanic cracks.

He asked why the launch was heading north, and the Araiza brothers informed him they were going up-lake to their home in Granada. Something sharp and clipped in their voices kept him from disputing this decision.

It did not deter him, however, from launching a little later into an account — not the first one he’d given them, either — of how, over a hundred years ago, his great-great-grandfather had landed in Nicaragua with only fifty-eight bold Yankee followers, and soon had successfully stormed Granada itself.

Bagong Buno watched the sun that was rising for Don Guillermo sink into the Gulf of Tonkin, now swollen as big as it had seen shrunken small twelve hours ago, so that it seemed to engulf North Vietnam. He thought of his strongbox in the cabin and how it now held a small bag of golden guineas and condors and morocotas and two larger bags of silver coins — the modest loot of the “Sumatra Queen.” He touched the yellow silk hankerchief bound so piratically around his head, and he looked roguishly around at Cobber-Hume and said: “Yo-ho-ho, eh, baik sobat?”

“And a bottle of rum,” the big Australian affirmed. “And a pipe of the poppy for you, since that’s not against your religion.”

Bagong hung grinned, but then his face grew grave and he said softly and intently: “ Pagi dan ayer surut!”

Morning and the low tide! Truly, he could hardly bear to contemplate the waiting for them. He had long ago decided what wreck he would try for then: the near-legendary Spanish treasure ship Lobo de Oro. The Tiger of the Mud would try conclusions with the Wolf of Gold!

Barbara Katz’s first reaction to the double-barreled shotgun muzzle poked through the driver’s window near Benjy’s hunched shoulders was that here was just one more weary bit of the weird flotsam and scour they’d been driving and skidding over, past, through, and around for the first three hours of daylight. Sandy soil — lots of that; leaves and fronds and matted sedge; uprooted bushes and small trees; ruined cars and farm machinery; dead animals and — Don’t stop! — people; wire — that could be devilish, especially the barbed stuff; they’d had to lay boards across one dragged and leveled fence to get the Rolls over without puncturing the tires; sodden flowers plastered here and there, including a remarkable number of scarlet poinsettias; houses and barns, both fragmentary and almost intact — they’d had to find a looping sideroad to get around one monstrous cluster of those. Everything steaming in the heat, as if a swiftly dissipating fog were coming out of the ground. Of course there had been live people, too, though not so very many of those, and they either acting stunned and helpless or else going very much about their business, such as shoring up houses on high ground, hoisting planks into big trees, or going places in cars or on horses. Once a small airplane had passed overhead, its motor sounding loud and self-important.

Barbara’s second reaction to the shotgun muzzle was that here was the nasty emergency she’d been expecting all along, and thank God she had the short-barreled .38 revolver in her right hand under her thigh next to old KKK, and if she had to, she hoped she could whip it up and start shooting through the window — though if that just got Benjy and Hester blown to bits in the front seat it wasn’t going to do any good, even though the motor of the Rolls was idling softly. If they just had a few seconds’ start -

Her third reaction to the shotgun muzzle was to see the fresh rust on it and wonder if its cartridges were wet, in which case she might hold the balance of power and needn’t actually fire, only threaten — but that was guessing.

The voice from behind the shotgun had a buzz in it that was lazy yet menacing, rather like the horsefly going back and forth against the inside of the sedan’s rear window.

“This is an inspection point We’re collecting toll. What were you doing—”

“We were only changing a tire,” Barbara answered sharply.

“—back in Trilby?” the buzzing voice finished.

So that, she thought, was the name of the miserable smashed village through whose crookedly choked main street they’d zigzagged twenty minutes ago. They should have called it Svengali!

Aloud she said hurriedly, “We were just coming through from Palm Beach. We can pay the toll,” but as she fumbled with her left hand at the black bag on her lap, two thick-corded sun-reddened arms came through the window and took the bag and one horny hand shifted to her chin and tilted her face up, and for a second she glared into a thin, unshaven, fish-eyed face and fought down the impulse to put a bullet in it or bite the hand, and then the arms went away with the bag, and the voice behind them said: “Hey, the old geezer must be one of them Palm Beach millionaires. Lots of paper money here.”

Barbara said, “He’s very sick. He’s in a coma. We’re trying to get him to—”

“One of them Yankee millionaires,” the buzzing voice cut her off, “who come down here and lord it and pay nigras white man’s wages and then run like chickens when the Lord tests us. We’ll take the money for the Jubilee Fund and we’ll take the two nigra gals — they’ll make the hill a little more comfortable. Get out, you two, quick! — or I’ll blow a hole in your high-yellow chauffeur.”

And he rested the muzzle of his gun against Benjy’s side.

This is it, Barbara thought, but as she started to bring up the revolver she felt old KKK’s clawlike fingers grip her hand on the gun with startling strength, holding it down. He cleared his throat hawkingly and next he was speaking in a voice louder than she’d ever heard from him, a voice that rasped imperiously.

“Did I hear some goddam turkey-necked cracker questioning the color of my son Benjy? I thought by your words you were Southrons out there, not mud-eating gophers!”

There was a murmuring outside, angry but uncertain. The gun pulled away from Benjy. Then old KKK, his features creasing like an old vulture’s as he stared at the men in overalls, intoned portentously, “When will the Black Night end?”

Slowly, almost as though it were drawn out of him against his will, the one with the buzzing voice replied, “With the dawn of the White Jubilee.”

“Hallelujah!” old KKK responded. “Convey to the Grand Chanticleer of Dade City the greetings of the Grand Chanticleer of Dade County. Benjamin, it would pleasure me if you drove on!”