Deadfall: Hunters (15 page)

Emma did say that. She was, as were so many others in her village, completely certain that the American missionaries there would be able to help them. I was waiting for Tague to make a comment about American arrogance, but he didn’t.

Emma quickly found out that, yes, Americans were just human. Turns out, the head honcho missionary guy had bottled up their little compound and wasn’t allowing anyone in. Rumor was, it had taken some of the other volunteers or helpers to convince him to allow the refugees in. Emma mentioned that everything was calm for the next month or so. The missionary’s fears had come to naught as the trickle of refugees barely made a dent in the compound’s population and after that first week, they didn’t see anyone new. They had food and water and the ability to grow more food if needed. The zombies seemingly preferred to go down the mountains instead of up.

Regardless, Emma said that the main missionary ran things like a prison. He locked people up at night, for their safety, and rationed the food, generally keeping the best food for his little group as well as keeping their own separate supply. The people that they had been ‘working’ with were cast aside as well. They really managed to paint a pretty picture of how Americans were supposed to be. When some of the villagers wanted to use their vehicle to go scout for survivors, they weren’t allowed to. A woman caught stealing food to try to feed her children was kicked out of the camp. There were some of the volunteers that did all they could to help out the refugees, but the damage was done.

Then Abraham showed up. It had been a while since anyone new had shown up when the old black man came ambling into the village, almost unnoticed. No one knew who he was, but it didn’t take long for everyone to know what he was. Now, I’m still not sure what the word was Emma used, but he was, what I understand, a Voodoo priest. Emma then, quickly, and before we could say anything, stopped her story there to explain to us that Voodoo was a greatly misunderstood religion, and that we probably had a very poor understanding of it. I had studied it in the past, and knew that American movies had made a mash out of what it really was, but then again, Hollywood had done that to most subjects. Emma explained that Voodoo priests served as a middle man between the people and the voodoo gods, spirits of nature and the souls of those departed. They also served as advisors, counselors and healers. They didn’t pretend to use magic to cure illnesses, but instead had a really good understanding of herbs. Emma said, “We use doctors if we have to.”

The Voodoo priest showed up at this village and offered his manner of help. Now you can imagine that a Christian missionary who is already running things as a borderline dictatorship wasn’t about to welcome a Voodoo priest with open arms. At first, they didn’t quite understand who he was, despite being told by the villagers. Once he setup his own little herb shop, and naturally had the attention of many in the village, the head missionary nearly lost it. He wanted the man tossed out and had gathered some of his fellow Americans to help but the villagers would not allow it. There was a mini coup and the villagers were prepared to toss the Americans out, but the priest forbade it. He said that everyone needed each other in order to survive. There was an uneasy truce. Oddly enough, the priest agreed with most of the Americans. He said there were almost no survivors left and there was no point in sending out search parties. He also encouraged people to start growing their own food. The little village was able to survive. Emma isn’t sure when, but at some point in the next months, the head missionary, his family and most of his followers vanished in the middle of the night. Other volunteers and workers had remained behind, including one of the missionary’s daughters, but they never saw the missionaries again.

So now they lived their existence on the top of the mountains, surviving off what they grew and the left over supplies. The scenario sounded very familiar.

Here was the oddest thing about it all. The Voodoo man, Abraham, took care of the medicine he could and the village was run by a group of chosen people. Hooray democracy. But Emma told us that this Abraham guy guaranteed their safety in the village. He made it very clear that the zombies were not a danger at all as long as he was around. That made me wonder if he was a shuckster that just took advantage of the fact the zombies didn’t go uphill, OR, was there something to it. It was his name, after all, that was in my father’s journal.

Unless there was another Abraham on Haiti that knew something about zombies.

It didn’t rain the next morning, this morning. At least not for a while. We woke up covered in clouds and then the sun peaked through just as we hit the road. We reached the village this afternoon and we went straight to Emma’s grandmother. Of course, news of the new people in the village came quick. We met with two of the ‘elected officials’ who let us know where we would stay. They said they were dealing with some kind of emergency and that there would be an official meeting the next morning.

It DID rain this afternoon and I have been sitting here in the porch of this tiny brick house writing up my latest entry. Blevin has been taking a nap in a hammock nearly the whole afternoon and Janine and Tague vanished for a while before coming back with assorted fruits. Maxie said it right, if you could forget about everything for a moment, you could almost believe we were on vacation.

In the midst of this tropical ‘vacation’, I dug into my pack to see what I should eat tonight. The first thing that came out was an extra old package of mac and cheese. Yup. Dehydrated pasta and cheese sauce tonight. I wonder if I could trade it with someone for something exotically Caribbean. Probably not.

I met people today. Important people. None, of course, more important than the village ‘leader’, Abraham. He would not inform me his last name. I’m not sure if it’s a pride thing, like soccer players and their one word names only, or if there was any other reason. So all I have is that his name is Abraham. Good enough I guess.

It has been two days since my last entry. I collapsed in bed the other night after a very busy day, and then yesterday was equally as busy. It’s raining like crazy right now, this morning, so I figured it was as good a time as any to catch up.

I was greeted that first morning at the door to our little house, by a kid. He was probably eight or nine years old. I have to admit it was a bit of shock, a clash of two worlds colliding. In one, the old world where it was normal to see kids, and in the other world, after Deadfall, where I hadn’t really seen any kids. Yet there he was. A black kid with cutoff jean shorts, a t-shirt with the Philadelphia Eagles logo, short shaved head and a pair of bright brown eyes looking up at me. In the most rudimentary English, he said that Abraham would see me now.

Tague was the only one awake at that time. I left with a nod.

That kid led me up through the village as it was starting to wake up that morning. Water was still running down in little streams, cutting little canyons through the dirt road. It must have rained last night at some point. What a surprise. Chickens were crowing, somewhere ahead of us, or behind us. Probably all around us. I’m still not sure just what people do here on a daily basis, but they were beginning to get out and about to do these things.

After taking a right at the village center where an old roofless church was, the kid finally led me to a small cinder block house. It was simple, but relatively nice. There were metal windows that could be cranked open and shut and they even had screens behind them. This whole time I was picturing the man living in some kind of beat down wooden shack, maybe built precariously on the bones of a dinosaur, or at least an old tree. Instead, it was one of the nicest houses around.

Turns out, the house was also the village hospital. See, it’s doctor Abraham. Yes, doctor. I met the tall black man in his dining room where he was serving some cooked chicken pieces along with eggs, milk and oranges and passion fruit. How do I know these things? He told me. And it was damn good too. He was very proud to admit that he had cooked it himself, from his own share of food. He offered the kid a plate of food. The little guy accepted with a giant smile, and disappeared through the back of the house.

Then, I smelled it. Coffee. Now, I’m not a coffee drinker, but this time, I had to pour some into my milk. It was an odd tasting milk too. Goat milk I was informed. Years ago, there’s no way I would have touched it, but that day, it tasted fantastic. Everything was so, well, fresh. After months of eating food that was meant to remain preserved for years of not decades, it was an explosion in my mouth to eat food that would spoil in a day or two if left unrefrigerated.

I want to get the stupid out of the way first.

So I was informed that he was a doctor. Upon hearing those words, despite seeing exactly where I was, the first words out of my mouth were: “Like, witch doctor?” Yes, I uttered those words. I was so transfixed in the thought of voodoo, zombies, Haiti and all that, that I simply couldn’t see past that. It only gets worse though, because the moment I uttered those words, the first thing I thought was if he would curse me, you know, with a curse.

The doctor just laughed it off. Nope, he wasn’t a ‘witch doctor’, but an actual doctor. He had studied medicine in Descartes University in Paris and was an actual legit doctor. He had returned to Haiti to open a practice nearly twenty years ago. It was then that his father had revealed to him his own background and legacy. It would change his life.

Abraham’s family has its roots in the darkest of Haitian history. His forefathers were there with Jean-Jaques at the battle of Desartiers when they finally defeated the French. Those that fought that day didn’t come from the mixed black that formed most of the rebellion ranks, and not even from the free black men, but from the slaves that had toiled the lands for over a century. In all the brutality that ensued, from the massacre of the island’s white people to the centuries of dictators, his family managed to survive, and by the 1950s, prosper, if at least by Haitian standards. Abraham’s father had been their village’s doctor as well, but he would only find out many years later that his father had never had formal training. That is because he HAD been a witch doctor, at least in the way I thought I understood.

Abraham never knew. That was my first look at how these men and this religion actually was. It wasn’t some creepy blood and animal entrails kind of deal. It was just men and women with a different understand of the world around them and choosing to believe in the explanations they came up with. I asked Abraham if he believed in voodoo, and he said yes without cracking a smile.

That being said, he was just as surprised about zombies as everyone else had. Abraham told me about the zombies he had learned from voodoo. It was a drug, an herb, which could induce complete stupor in an individual, leaving him completely open to suggestion. The people that chose to ‘create’ zombies did so to get a servant for a while or to somehow promulgate their own power and influence. But the zombies that rose from Deadfall were something else. The dead were rising from the dead, with one single purpose in mind, the destruction of mankind. Abraham watched in terror as the dead added to their horde those first couple of days. He had tried to reach his fiancé, but never saw her again. He did find his father, and they both fled into the mountains, along with those few lucky survivors. He claimed it was pure luck, or fate, that spared him.

In a village on the southern part of the island, he learned a completely different fate. The village was in a small valley at a crossroads. In hindsight, the worst place to be. The horde surrounded them at night and attacked the village. Both he and his father managed to flee, but with many wounds. He had to carry his father for three days until the old man died from his wounds.  What he said next, shocked me to my core. He sat there with his father, speaking for a few moments before he passed on. He gave his son a circular stone with an engraving on it with his dying breath. He tried as hard as he could to press his knife through his skull, but simply couldn’t gather the strength to do it. So he waited. He tied his father’s corpse up, hoping it would be easier to kill the monster than his own father. But he waited. One whole day, he waited. The next morning, he dug a shallow grave and buried his father. He had never turned.

I nearly threw up. I spilled everything about my father. I’m fairly certain I was talking so fast that very little made sense. I’m not even one hundred percent sure what I told him. The main gist of it was that my father had also not turned. Then I remembered.

“Did you meet my father?”

My father, I found out, had come to Haiti, some seven years ago. He had come here to research for his books or movies, I’m not sure which one. Maybe, at some point I can look back to see which. In either case, he had come down to Haiti and spent weeks down here just meeting people. Abraham isn’t sure how, but my father found his way into Doulier, where Abraham lived. Someone somewhere had told my father that Abraham was an expert of Voodoo. It turned out that in many ways he was. Abraham was an intelligent man, studied in medicine and science, and yet believed one hundred percent in the island’s African religion.

I can see why my father would have liked this man.

Abraham allowed my father to stay with him for a week, and go with him to every single thing he did on a daily basis. And they talked. A lot. My father pried and asked about everything about his religion. He even asked some extraordinary things that at the time, Abraham shrugged off. It wouldn’t be till years later the Haitian doctor would have an inkling of what my father was talking about.

At this point, Abraham (I really want to call him Abe) handed me this piece of paper. It was old, but not ancient. It looked like something I would have found in a hundred year old newspaper. It was handwritten in ink. I looked over it, but it was in a language I simply didn’t understand. With a smile, Abraham handed me another paper, far newer. It was a translation of the first paper. I read it first without really thinking of the words, and then reread it. They were verses, almost like Bible verses, but it wasn’t from any Bible I knew. It was dark. It talked about a voice in the darkness.

“What is this?” I could only ask

“What you father was looking for.”

My father had asked Abraham questions about an old Voodoo story. The doctor hadn’t recognized it at the time, but a few years later, after asking his father about it, Abraham tracked my father’s questions down to an old collection of papers some French archeologist had dug up at the turn of the 20
th
century. The paper I had in my hand. Abraham had translated it. He said that it came from what some old African stories called Words of the Voice.

I could have been hit by a hammer and it wouldn’t have hit as hard.

Everything was coming together here, in this small village in Haiti, and yet, there was nothing resolved at all. I really still didn’t know why I had come here, even if I had found out a bit about my father.

“Do you have the whole book thing?” I asked, holding up the old piece of paper.

Abraham nodded. He only had some of the papers the French archeologist had translated. The archeologist vanished without a clue and no one knows if he actually found the original manuscript. He had originally been after shipwrecks and other colonial era discoveries.

So what did this have to do with anything zombie or Deadfall related?

I asked Abraham if I could copy down his translated copy and he offered me his own copy. I’m going to tuck it into this journal.

We had to take a break there in storytelling. Abraham was going to visit some sick people that morning, and the afternoon would see his little clinic open to the public. I followed him around and he showed me the small simple rooms with the most basic of equipment, and yet it was the nicest thing I had seen since my mountain home. He grabbed some gear, packed it all into a backpack and headed out, but not before telling me that the REAL leader of the village would be coming by around lunch time to talk to me.

Sarah Aegwood.

Daughter of Reverend Jordan Aegwood. The head missionary guy who skipped town.

I heard about this before I met her. After making my way back to the house, I gathered up the troupe and got them caught up to speed with my meeting with the doctor. It was then that they informed me about Sarah and who she was. The four of them had gone out to get water and had met with an enthusiastic group of villagers. Those that could speak English, asked them all sorts of questions. Tague, in turn, did the same. To those that couldn’t, Tague used his French to try to get some words through.

So with the image in mind that this woman had stayed behind, I was at the same time curious and a bit mortified. Was this lady going to be a female version of her father? Ruthless in her righteousness? And if she was, why had she remained behind?  There were so many questions that needed answers, but all that went right out the door when she showed up.

Writing this now, I feel extremely guilty. I can only come to the conclusion that it was a basic human male reaction. It’s the only thing I can tell myself, but it doesn’t help me feel better. All I can think about now is Heather, and that doesn’t help matters at all. The reason for all this consternation is the fact that somewhere around noon, I came face to face with an absolutely stunning blonde.

Now let me get a few things straight. I’m sure I have mentioned this before, but I am a sucker for women. I don’t consider myself a pervert (who does) nor am I a weirdo, but to me, women just make me melt. To then meet Sarah, and she ended up being a really beautiful woman, was one of those breath taking moments. She was just a bit shorter than me and had an athletic form. She likely played sports in school. Her blonde hair was just over shoulder length in curls that must be natural because there weren’t any hair shops around. She had blue eyes and a smile to die for.

I don’t know why I say stuff like that.

In that moment, all my weird paranoid suppositions about her vanished. It’s funny though, because, it’s not like being a beautiful woman means that she would also be a bonafide saint. She could easily still be a bitch. In fact, in my past, most beautiful women knew they were beautiful, and were therefore, bitches.

But she wasn’t.

Sarah was one of the nurses that had come down with the missionaries. That she could work with her father was a bonus. As we walked from our guest house down to her residence right off the main plaza in the village, she talked in great deal about all the work her group had done with the village, both spiritually and physically. It was odd to hear her pride in her work hit hints of doubt whenever she mentioned her father.

She continued asking questions about us and I answered in my usual hidden message type. We had been sailing on our boat, surviving, and had found the fort at Liberte and that Emma had helped us escape. She nodded her head with a look of disgust. I asked her if she knew the people at the fort, and she said ‘All too well.’

It turns out, the main guy at the fort, the Captain, was Abraham’s brother. Malachi. Apparently they liked biblical names. The Old Testament type. As it turns out, the captain had, has, mental issues, some form of schizophrenia. I could have figured that out. After the dead began rising, he was able to escape the mental facility and make his way to Liberte. Sarah mentioned that he was in fact a very intelligent man, just, with issues. Maybe all of his voices were intelligent too. The captain did help people out, but at times, captured people and kept them prisoners. Abraham had attempted to deal with him at some point just before appearing at the village, but to no avail, as I could attest.