Chapter Fourteen

 

 

Faint and far off, Ryan heard the shrill noise of the trumpet from the village. His guess put them at least two miles away, with the lake lying directly behind them. The track was growing narrower, and they were passing fewer and fewer side trails.

 

"How long before we get to the old base?" Ryan asked. The young woman hadn't spoken a single word since they'd left the village, and he was beginning to wonder whether she spoke American. Or whether she might possibly be mute.

 

"It is about as far as the distance that we have already come," she replied after a long pause.

 

"Easy walk?"

 

She nodded, half turning to glance over her shoulder at the one-eyed man. "Easy for me. I am used to walking. Not so easy for all of you." It seemed as if her eyes searched out Doc when she said that.

 

He smiled at her, showing his wonderful teeth. "My dear child, you do me wrong. It is perfectly true that there are certain segments of my body that function less well than once they did. But that doesn't apply to all the parts. I am still capable of keeping up on a gentle stroll through the forest." He plucked out his swallow's-eye kerchief and wiped sweat from his brow.

 

"Just as long as we pause now and then for the briefest of rests."

 

The young woman looked puzzled. Jak touched her on the arm, making her jump like a startled deer. "Doc says he can walk all right," he said.

 

"Yes. Oh, yes."

 

 

 

RAIN FLOWER TOOK DOC at his word, setting an even more brisk pace, deeper and deeper into the jungle. The trail grew more narrow, and she turned to ask Ryan to use his panga to hack away some overgrown strands of liana.

 

"Looks like this track isn't used all that much," he commented, wiping the sticky green ichor from the polished steel blade and resheathing it.

 

"We afraid spirits of past. Nobody comes this way for long years."

 

Krysty moved alongside Ryan. "Why are we going to look at this ghost-haunted place, lover?"

 

"Never know what you might find. Itzcoatl said something about there being a fight there in predark times. If the natives are scared of it, then you never know what might be there waiting, untouched."

 

"And whatever walks there walks alone," added Doc, who'd joined them in time to hear the end of their conversation. "As the wonderful Shirley Jackson once said."

 

J.B. was at their heels. "If it was an army base and it was sealed like the redoubts, then there's a good chance of picking up some ammo or some unknown weaponry."

 

"Soon there," Rain Flower said. "Water there."

 

"Could do with a drink," Mildred stated. "Amazing how quickly you can get dehydrated in such damp weather."

 

 

 

"IT'S AN M-551," J.B. said, surveying a rusted heap of scrap metal that lay almost buried in the undergrowth just off the trail.

 

"Tank?" Ryan asked, doubtfully. He could see the tracks, fallen into ribbons of orange decay, and what might have been the barrel of a heavy cannon.

 

"Light tank," the Armorer amended. "It had a four-man crew. Carried a missile launcher, as well as a range of machine guns. Used to be called the Sheridan. It was employed a lot out in Nam."

 

"Has it been here ever since the nukecaust of 2001?" Mildred asked. "I can't believe that there's anything left of it."

 

"No strong winds. No frost to break it up." J.B. reached out and touched a piece of the side paneling, crumbling it between his fingers like red sand. "Just rotting quietly away here in the jungle."

 

"What happened to its crew?" Mildred asked.

 

"I'll look," Dean chirped, eagerly vaulting up onto the front of the ancient vehicle.

 

Rain Flower rubbed her knuckle on her forehead, turning away, looking frightened.

 

"Don't worry," said Ryan reassuringly. "Any ghosts are long, long dead."

 

The hatch above the commander's control position was open, hanging on by a few threads of rusting steel. Dean knelt and started to lean in.

 

"Look for snakes," the young woman called, stopping him dead. "Big snakes here."

 

The boy hesitated. He banged his fist a few times, generating a hollow, dull ringing sound. Nothing happened, except for a flight of vivid yellow parakeets rising, screeching, into the upper branches of the trees.

 

He slowly lowered his head inside the turret of the old tank, staying motionless for a few moments. "Nothing," he called, his voice muffled and echoing. "Stripped bare."

 

"Come on back," Ryan said. "Best stay on the trail. What's left of it. Could be mined."

 

J.B. nodded. "Probably antipersonnel rather than magnetic. Wouldn't expect any big military move against the base. More likely paratroops. light-armed skirmish unit. And any mines laid way back before the long winters must mostly have deteriorated by now." He took off his fedora and mopped his forehead. "They'd have antidisturbance devices fitted, as well."

 

"The trail's about vanished." Ryan stood still. "I can hear water falling close by."

 

The native woman smiled at him, recovering something of her nerve. "Yes. Close now."

 

 

 

THE BASE DIDN'T COMPARE to some of the massive redoubts that the friends had encountered over the past months. It wasn't built into a mountainside or hidden deep underground.

 

At first glance it looked like an average long-abandoned air base back in Deathlands a few weather-stained administration buildings and Quonset huts surrounded by tumbled towers and fragmented coils of rusted razor wire.

 

But it seemed as if a camouflage expert had been at work, disguising the complex.

 

Most of the roofs had fallen in, the windows broken, and moss and vines were draped all over the ruins so that they almost vanished into the background of the forest.

 

Everyone stopped and stared at the lost relic from before the brief and bloody war that ended civilization as the world had known it.

 

"Kind of spooky," Mildred said quietly.

 

"I doubt we will find any human remains here," Doc said. "Not after nearly a hundred years of tropical weather."

 

"But there could be some hardware hidden away," J.B. stated hopefully.

 

"I not go in," the young woman said, seating herself comfortably on a fallen baobab tree. "Wait here you coming back. Much time."

 

"Frightened of ghosts?" Jak asked, sitting by her.

 

"Yeah. Am."

 

"But you have god with you. Nothing to be feared with god at your side."

 

"What kind of god is Jak?" Ryan asked. "What's the story about this?"

 

 

 

IN THE END, the process of discovery was protracted by the young woman's poor grasp of the American tongue, but they learned something of the background to Jak's godship.

 

As they stood there, close to a small, stagnant pool, a swarm of midges pestered them, forcing a move closer to the ruined base. They walked past the crumpled remains of the red-and-white pole that had once been the first step in the security of the place, now lying broken and neglected, overgrown with weeds.

 

They stopped by the old guardhouse, with its warning notice board almost illegible from age, showing warnings in American, Portuguese, Spanish and in what they guessed had to be the language of the local natives. There was absolutely nothing inside the building, except for a scattered carpet of splintered glass.

 

There Rain Flower finally unraveled a complicated tale of legend and myth.

 

It seemed that back in the long-lost times of first man and first woman, when the gods walked the earth in their various guises, there was a very beautiful girl, barely past puberty.

 

Her name was Tlazolteotl and she was beloved by many of the gods, who all desired to lie with her and father her firstborn child. Because of her rare beauty, they all knew that her sonit had to be a sonwould be one of the most marvelous humans ever known.

 

But the maiden had no wish to be either the bride or mistress of any of the gods, for she truly loved a young warrior of her own tribe.

 

One night she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed a most mysterious dream.

 

She was swimming in the bottom of a deep and beautiful lake when a dolphin came to her.

 

Finding out from Rain Flower what kind of a creature it was took several minutes until Doc used the ferrule of his swordstick to scratch a sketch of a dolphin in the soft dirt in front of the old guardhouse.

 

The dolphin was a nameless god who was sympathetic to the weeping of Tlazolteotl, and he took her to a grotto filled with mountains of precious stones, glittering and dancing like living fire.

 

He touched a round piece of rare white jade, valued above price, no larger than a half-ripe pea, telling the young woman that she would be preserved from the lusts and unwelcome attention of the other gods if she would swallow the jade.

 

On waking, she walked in the forest.

 

It had rained, and some loose dirt had washed from a steep bank outside her village. And there, among the mud, lay a tiny berry of pure white jade.

 

She swallowed it and immediately became pregnant.

 

When the child was delivered nine months later, he was a boy, with eyes like rubies and hair as white as the driven snow upon the Mountain of the Star itself. Citlaltepetl.

 

He grew magically and was a full-grown man of twenty by the end of the first year of his life.

 

During that mysterious year the crops grew well and the rains came, and every battle was a victory.

 

But the young man vanished on his first birthday and had never been seen or heard of since.

 

But the legends told of him, told of what could come to pass one day.

 

 

 

KRYSTY HAD NODDED. "This young man will return and all will be well? Is that it?"

 

Rain Flower nodded shyly. "Yes. Old ones say this. Now he has come."

 

Jak had listened closely to the tale, finally shaking his head in disgust. "Old story's shit," he said. "Come from the swamps. Know my mother and father. Not god."

 

But the young woman wasn't to be persuaded of that. During the telling of the myth, her eyes kept turning toward the albino teenager, showing unquestioning worship of him.

 

"You sure you won't come farther with us?" Ryan asked. "Mebbe better than staying on your own."

 

She shook her head, covering her eyes. "No. You look for spirits of dead. Not me." She touched the holster with the 10-round Savage. "Be safe from whip men or Jaguar people."

 

"Right. We'll be back in not more than an hour or so. Come on, people."

 

 

 

THE CONCRETE ROAD into the base was barely visible beneath a carpet of moss. To the right Ryan spotted another of the small tanks, settled on its tracks, covered in a shrub with brilliant orange flowers.

 

The first building, still in sight of the guardhouse, was in a terrible state, with only one wall standing.

 

J.B. went closer to examine it, running his hand over the surface of the reinforced concrete. "Bullet holes and grenade fragments and burn marks," he said. "The natives were right. There was some sort of a battle here."

 

His foot disturbed something in the undergrowth and he bent down, picking up a bunch of twigs and clinging vines. It wasn't until he peeled them away that the others could see that he was holding a blaster, a long rifle.

 

"I recognize that," Ryan said, "from our run-ins with Gregori Zimyanin. It's a Dragunov sniper's rifle, 7.62 caliber, isn't it?"

 

The Armorer nodded. "Right. The old reworked Kalashnikov. Just like we saw the Ruskies using."

 

Mildred shook her head. "You mean Russians landed down here? Wherever 'here' is."

 

Ryan nodded. "We heard stories of them dropping paratroopers in parts of Deathlands in the last hours of skydark. In the far northwest. Alaska and northern Canada. But nobody I know ever found any real proof of that. Least there's proof that it happened down here in the jungle."

 

"This place must've had a tactical importance." Ryan looked around. "Hard to imagine now."

 

"Might have been a comp comm center," Krysty said. "Radar and satellite links to all that hardware circling around up in deep space."

 

J.B. nodded. "Makes sense. They might have put them in from Russkie fleet exercises down in the Caribbean. Just drop a handful of specialized troops off a carrier. Surely been a firefight here."

 

Doc had sat on the grass, wiping his forehead. "By the Three Kennedys! This is one of the least welcoming environments I have ever encountered. I would appreciate returning to the village and that cool lake as soon as possible."

 

"Want to go back and keep Rain Flower company, Doc?" Ryan asked. "We won't be that long."

 

The old man stood, looking weary. "No. I think that I prefer to stay with you. I sympathize with the little mite. This is undeniably a little on the spooky side."

 

"There's a wrecked chopper over there," Jak said, pointing with a long white finger toward the edge of the forest.

 

"CH-47," J.B. said, dropping the rusted relic of the Dragunov back in the grass. "The big Chinook."

 

All of them turned toward the entrance of the base as they heard Rain Flower screaming at the top of her lungs.