“I . . . thon’t—” Raza’s mouth was full of hornets. He spat them out, hard and wet, and waited for another blow—which did not come. For some reason, this scared him more than anything else the last few minutes had wrought.
Ask me again, Raza thought. Ask me the question! But there was no question—only excruciating pain and even more excruciating silence. His mind was racing. Maybe a bullet this time. And Raza flinched at the image of his head, mostly gone above the eyes.
But the room remained silent.
Then Raza’s mind fixed on something else. Something important. Yes. Something that can save me. The gringo. He willed his mind to clear.
“Stranger . . . choo days . . . ag . . . o . . . Amer . . . Amer . . . can.” The hinge of his jaw was not working right. Still, his only concern was getting the words out.
“Witch . . . esss . . . housh . . .” Raza spat again. “Witch anner cra-zzee hush-ban. Liv . . .” He paused. The clicking of the hinge and the dribble of fresh blood was making him dizzy, so he pointed: “. . . ne . . . rrrr . . . edge . . . town.”
Instantly, the gun muzzle was withdrawn.
The pain was coming in dull waves now, but with great effort, Raza raised his head. A tall figure had materialized in front of him. He had a narrow face, with a thin mustache.
Something familiar, Raza thought, squinting as if trying to remember the name of an old acquaintance.
Was he a movie actor? His mind flashed to a film he’d seen in Cuiabá.
Raza could see that the thin-faced man was smiling. But the smile wasn’t making him feel any better at all. In fact, Jesus Raza suddenly felt his bowels churning.
The smiling man nodded slightly.
Suddenly he knew. It was—
Raza’s head was jerked back by a powerful hand and in that same sweeping motion he was thrown forward onto his knees. He kicked backward with one foot and tried to stand but his hands slid on something hot and wet. His whole world tilted into dizziness and irrational calm, tilted like the deck of a sinking ship, leaving him puzzled that his fingers seemed to be resting under a warm spray.
The roof is leaking, he thought.
Raza called out to his wife. The bitch can clean it up. But his bisected trachea only let out a long, bubbling gurgle. Calm and a descending dreamscape were gaining dominion over his thoughts—a dreamscape in which shadowy figures stepped out of the corners, their hands lengthening toward him, as if seeking to drag him into the earth itself. The shadows and his own wet croak snapped the toughest man in Chapada to hyperconsciousness. And in that moment he saw two men in black uniforms.
As the shadows stepped closer, the image flickered like a candle in a draft.
But why are they upside d—
Jesus Raza’s consciousness blinked off like a light switch, and he toppled backward, landing on his own contorted face and rolling sideways.
The smiling shadow with the thin mustache kept close and silent vigil, counting off the seconds between dying and death, between Earth and Hell. The shadow looked at a pocket watch, noting the moment Raza’s eyes stopped searching, recording the exact instant that life had gone out of them.
“Thank you.” A voice addressed the dead man, in German. “You have been most cooperative.” Then he tucked his watch into a tunic pocket and calmly stepped over Jesus Raza’s freshly severed head. It mattered little to the shadow man that the two dead privates, Fuchs and Becker, deserved their fates. They had been fools. Even worse, they had broken S?nger’s movie camera in their deaths. The important thing, the only thing that mattered, was that they were German soldiers—his soldiers. In the process of tracking down their killer, this dirty, drunken local, as highly as he thought of himself, was utterly dispensable.
The SS officer was quite proud of his own perceived place in history, though unaware that posterity would reduce him to a stereotypical boogieman. But this too would have brought a smile to Colonel Gerhardt Wolff’s face.
At the table, Sergeant Vogt used the last of the foul-smelling alcohol the dead man had been drinking to clean his stiletto, and now he was wiping the blade on the homespun tablecloth.
The colonel appreciates the beauty of those cuts, Vogt thought, watching as Wolff opened the door to the bedroom and entered silently.
From inside the room, he caught a faint whimper and a whispered response. “Ssssshhhhhhh.”
And then . . . silence.
Like a spider, Vogt thought, and grinned. Just like a spider.
CHAPTER 11
Extinction
The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
—ARTHUR STANLEY EDDINGTON, PARAPHRASING J.B.S. HALDANE
January 25, 1944
It was midafternoon and MacCready had been trying to figure out where he’d experienced a worse combination of heat and humidity before.
Bangkok? Maybe. August in Port Arthur, Texas? He winced at the memory.