Apricot brandy (22 page)

Shit, how he hated that big iron-pumping, steroid-sucking asshole. Because Babcock was one of those guys who thought
his
shit didn’t stink, he left it lying in heaps all over the landscape, putting his colleagues at a risk they’d taken pains to avoid.

Haynes was still sweating bullets over that Pakistani fiasco. He had been one of the responding units after Babcock. The asshole claimed a tail-light violation as his reason for initiating contact with the van, but when Haynes arrived, even after the van had hit the tree, both taillights were working fine.

The thing was, you start capping Mexes or Pakis by the side of the road, even if you’re a
cop
, and you never know when an investigation might come down. Some goody-two-shoes civil rights lawyers already had a class action pending, accumulated missing persons complaints, mostly from ag-worker families right up here in Gravenstein County. If Babcock’s blunder lit a fire under that lawsuit, some
responsible
cops up here could suffer for it, including Haynes himself.

It wasn’t enough that Haynes’ own trio of brown brothers— two Pakis and one Mex— had no family, no friends up here, because you could never be
sure
what any of these foreigners might know about each other. And it didn’t matter that Haynes had been following Marty Carver’s orders.

Each time, Harst had met him in the swamp, and each time, had given Haynes the piece that he had used. Brrrr. Just facing that old monster with his blurry bloated eyes made Haynes’ balls shrink up in his shorts— all the more since Jack Fox stood behind Harst. Haynes hadn’t seen Harst around for a few days, but that didn’t matter. Jack Fox was
dead
and
that
didn’t make any difference either. If it ever surfaced— so to speak— that Haynes had put those three men in the swamp, he still wouldn’t utter either of those dread names. He’d stonewall it and take his chances. Because Fox and Harst were into some strange, scary shit.

Well, looky here! What a stroke of luck! If that wasn’t Ape-cock’s stolen cruiser, big as life, headed right towards him! He hit the flashers and the siren, downshifted, braked and went into a sliding one-eighty, meaning to drop side-by-side with the Dodge aimed the same way, catch up with it, and crowd it off the road.

But as he slid screeching through his about-face, he was astonished to see the Dodge brake and swing sideways to meet his car flank-to-flank. And as their flanks hit with a crash, the Dodge accelerated in such a way— but how? It seemed impossible!— that both cars stuck fast side-to side and began a mated spinning, carouselling round and round, faster and faster while remaining poised on the very center of the highway, till Haynes’ door flew open and he was flung out. His door was locked, the seat belt buckled, yet his door flew open and he was flung out, the belt snapping like paper, as he went tumbling off the highway, tumbling and tumbling across the grass… .

All bruises and dizziness, he got to his knees and was fumbling for his sidearm, when a whirlwind of leaves descended upon him. It seized him like a pair of huge soft powerful hands— seized his body, lifted him high off the ground, and carried him through the air hanging upside down. Carried him back to the highway he’d been thrown from.

The anesthetic of his shock yielded quickly to the flux of his blood to his brain. He tried to thrash himself free, but the spinning air gripped him with a giant’s strength. The Dodge pulled away from his stalled cruiser, and then a little old woman with wild gray hair under a battered fedora got out from behind the wheel. Without taking her smiling eyes from his, she made a gesture at the car and, by themselves, its gas-port flapped open and its gas cap spun off.

“I am Quetzal. I am the servant of Itzamna, who brings the dead to life. I am the servant of Itzam-ye, who perches on the World-Tree and summons sorcery.” She reached her right hand into the wind-cone that held him and lightly touched his down-hanging head.

Haynes’ terror had not left him, but a dream-sensation was enfolding it. He was hanging upside down in the air in a leafy whirlwind! An impossible woman was speaking impossible words to him! Surely he was dreaming.

“You are named… Haynes. You have shed human blood into the mouth of Xibalba. Feeding him, you have borrowed his power. Now I borrow it from you.” Extending both hands, the old woman held Haynes’ face between them. “Forgive me, Haynes. You give pain freely. I do not. But I am afraid you must undergo… a violent change.” She grasped his head in hands strong as steel and tore it off his neck. Though her palms muffled his ears, he heard with excruciating clarity the snap of his spine and the more complex sundering of skin and muscle. In an instant he was smaller, simpler, lighter and he could feel a cold wet raggedness where his neck should be.

She shifted her grip, now holding the head by hair and scalp. He opened his eyes and saw the world turned right-side-up again. But, though he dangled upright under her fist, he saw his headless body still hanging upside down in that whirl of leaves, which now turned and tilted till the stump of his neck hung just above the opened gas-tank of the Dodge.

From above and behind him came the voice of the little old woman who was holding him. “Be consoled, Haynes. Your transformation will now fuel our flight.”

As Haynes watched, the envelope of wind which held his body contracted. A crackling noise of crumpling bones followed and his arms and legs twisted round his torso. His whole body torqued, turning like a wrung garment. A thick braided runnel of blood leapt from his neck-stump and tucked itself neatly, gurgling, down into the port of the gas-tank. At length, his body dropped onto the asphalt.

The whirlwind became two leafy shapes which opened the car’s doors and gestured his head and its bearer inside. The old woman slid behind the wheel, saying to him, “Forgive me if I make your hair a bit longer.”

Haynes felt his hair pulled long, longer from his scalp, then felt that long lock tied around the rearview, from which he now dangled, gazing out the windshield. Slanting his eyes, he found he could obliquely see the face of his possessor. She smiled at him and fired up the engine.

Haynes watched the highway flow towards them faster… faster… and awaited the awakening that would surely come, for he must be sleeping in his own bed or perhaps unconscious, knocked out in the crash of his cruiser. Look! The old woman had swung the car off the road, pulled back on the steering wheel, and the car was
rising
from the ground! They were flying, the cruiser’s tires spinning on sky! A mosaic of treetops flowed beneath them.

Of
course
it was a dream! He was fully conscious and his head was torn from his body! He was in a flying car!

And he felt so
aware
. Indeed, he knew the terrain below him, recognized that valley. There was the dirt road paralleling the stream he’d driven three times, each time with a brown passenger for Dr. Harst. Both the road and the stream it ran along ended at a swamp just on the edge of Jack Fox’s acres.

Oh yeah, for sure and beyond all doubt, this was a dream. Dreams used stuff that had actually happened, like right now they were parking just where he had parked
his
unmarked cruiser.

The old woman unhooked his hair and got out, dangling him from one hand. Flanking them two leafy woman shapes appeared, Haynes’ slanting glances told him. The three of them stepped to the brink of the swamp: a big black pond canopied by creeper-shrouded trees, the water scummed over with moss and algae, and crowded with half-sunk rotting logs. Quetzal turned him so he hung facing her. “I send you, Haynes, to your master. Bring him our message. He will dislike the message. I fear I cannot promise you will feel no pain. Tell him, please, that we are coming for him.”

She flung him over the swamp. Haynes tumbled through the green gloom— long, long his flight seemed, until he was crashing into fetid water and sinking like a stone, sinking. He saw below him huge shapes stirring, vague, pythonic bodies uncoiling. Fanged jaws gaped towards him and Haynes opened his mouth to scream (though voiceless in that airless deep) that he
had
no message, but when the jaws crushed his skull, and tasted the nutmeat of his brain, his message was delivered.

“Our enemy is warned, my daughters,” Quetzal said. “Your flesh is the air! Join your hands and bring us the Vortex! Uproot this swamp!”

Lupe and Emily caught her will like a flame. Standing face to face they linked their leafy fingers and spun, spun faster, sucking the autumn air into their gyration, drifting over the pool. Stripped foliage whipped into their whirlwind. Its tip sank like an auger into the pond and tore its waters spiraling up and away. The black tarn sank, one yard, two yards… the slimy bottom emerging into view, a knotted snakes’ nest of massive roots was revealed, scaly roots jeweled here and there with crude black eyes. Everywhere in their coils they clamped sodden human shapes, their clothes mostly rotted away, their flesh grown scaly as the unformed dragons gripped them in a sleep of undecaying death. And from the midst of this ophidian tangle one gnarled mass— a grotesque burl at first it seemed— hoisted itself in the gloom. Blistered with black eye-knobs, it unhinged crude jaws fanged with crooked thorns.

“See!” the witch shrilled. “On his feast of prey, they’ve fed almost to dragon-form. See our danger! Everywhere he feeds and feeding more, the more he takes on the Hunter’s shape. Strike! Smite! Avenge your murdered brothers and sisters!”

She flung the axes into the whirlwind, which divided into foliage-clad woman shapes. They bestrode the air a moment, hoisting their weapons, then plunged. Airborne they fought, light as leaves for all the brute bite of their whistling cleavers. Green blood sprayed from every blow. A complex tremor ran through the scaly coils and caused the sodden corpses they clenched to twitch and stir like waking sleepers. The jaws hissed and gnashed the air, but wooden sinews proved too crude and unformed to catch adversaries which its fangs could not have harmed in any case. Sap ran from a hundred wounds; the tentacles slowed, shuddered, and lay still. The onyx eyes dimmed and grew pallid, the jaws hissed wetly, then froze in death.

From her coat the witch drew an obsidian blade. “Daughters,” she said softly. “Bring them out to me and lay them in the grass.”

A score of dead, like scaly mummies bandaged in black bark, lay beneath the whispering trees, the branches stirring as the sun declined and the late afternoon breeze moved among the hills.

Quetzal knelt by the nearest of the dead and touched her obsidian point to where its heart would be. Quietly she said, “I free you to abide with me, to fight by my side, to know the wind and the sky once more, and the stars and the green hills of earth.”

She stabbed the sad shape once and a gust of air breathed from it, stirring the wild white locks that escaped her old black hat. She rose and knelt by the next of the dead.

And so Quetzal moved among them, as the sun declined and the sky turned rosy gold. As each corpse released its ghost, the dark husk began to crumple and its barklike fabric to dry and granulate, collapsing to a fine dust the breezes scattered, while vines and flowers, tiny twisted shoots at first, peeked from the subsiding residue. Morning glories, dandelions, poppies, lupines unfolded in the mellow light, while the breezy air grew busier still, full of a subtle, multidirectional stir. The trees were shaken and jostled, the grasses and shrubs twitched fitfully, and an ever-thickening airy traffic came alive around Quetzal as she knelt by corpse after corpse with her knife and her murmured words.

At length, the witch sat cross-legged amidst the flowery meadow she had made, surrounded by a new, still unseen, congregation.

“Each of you has your own history of suns and moons, of deeds and days, of loves and losses. But Xibalba has taken you from these lives of yours and you have lain since then with him. I must know what you have learned of him. Xibalba the green god is beauty. The green god is life. He has fed us with his flesh, all our millions, time without end. Why does he murder us now? Why does he hunt us? For years I have followed them, the men whose minds he has captured, the men he has sent forth to kill for him, to feed his dragons their human food. Come into me now, my brothers and sisters. Enter me with my breath. Make me know what you have learned of Xibalba’s will.”

Had some stranger come upon her, he would have seen no more than an old woman sitting in a field of unseasonably blooming flowers, breathing a bit strangely, breathing so deeply, again and again, and staring a bit strangely too, her eyes rapt on the trees surrounding her, the murmuring cascades of their leaves. No more than this would he have seen.

But for the witch those rippling leaves were living mosaics, fluid puzzle-works weaving visions: visions of rainforests writhing in Hell, geysers of gasoline spraying jeweled jungles, replanting them with fierce forests of orange flame rising to the sky, visions of rich wildernesses bulldozed flat, replaced by endless lawns where bulbous monocultures sprawled in their sameness, steer after steer, grapevine after grapevine, horizon to horizon, visions of vast scabs on the planet-skin, concrete and asphalt carapaces where steel monsters swarmed farting up a second atmosphere that diseased the first, that clogged the planetary lung, spreading deserts, spreading flood zones, drowning and parching the green god’s children, visions of ancient forest Titans toppled, patriarch after patriarch colliding with the earth, shattering into lumber stacks, mutating into suburbs, suburbs that entombed fertile soil forever, that sucked distant rivers and mountain lakes dry, emitting meanwhile more megatons of hydrocarbon gases skywards… .

Quetzal surged to her feet, fighting the air with lifted arms, her head leaned back till her hat fell off, her mouth gaping as if to howl, though no sound came out but something else, the stream of ghosts she had liberated re-erupting from her, her thin chest heaving as the air around her grew fitful in a widening zone of gusts spiraling up from the axis of her slight frame.