A Feast Unknown Read online

  Wilfred straightened up. “It’s all automatic now. If you want Little Miss Annihilator to land dead smack in the middle of their camp, press that button there.”

  “What about the hot jets from the missile?” I said.

  He grinned. He had been standing in one corner, as far away as possible from the flames which would issue. Undoubtedly, he had hoped I would be caught and burned. Moreover, I did not put it past the doctor to have a dummy button with a poisoned or drug-coated needle to pierce the thumb that pressed the button. I suspected that there were many traps which Wilfred was aching to use.

  I picked up a pair of pliers with insulated handles—watch out for electrical shock, too—and pushed the button with the nose of the pliers. The missile flamed and whooshed away. The truck did not even rock with the take-off. The heat from the jet warmed my skin as I stood beside Wilfred. If I had been unwary enough to be closer, I might have gotten a bad burn and been off balance enough for him to attack me.

  I was watching the screen but also flicking glances at Wilfred. He was staring wide-eyed at my penis, which had been rising as the rocket rose.

  The missile shot up in a high arc which the eye might not have been able to follow if the jets were not burning so brightly. It curved over and behind the hill. I looked back at the screen. The missile appeared suddenly, and whiteness gouted and smoke roiled out and up. Bodies, pieces of bodies, a truck, a jeep, and pieces of vehicles and equipment flew out of the cloud.

  I kept hold of my knife and my eye on Wilfred as I shook and groaned with the ecstasy. He moved away from me, his eyes on my spouting penis.

  “Man, you got a beautiful setup!” he whispered. “But you’re sure weird!”

  I said, “Load another!”

  He obeyed, while a third missile rose from the floor. He crouched beneath the tube, and I punched, the button. The third missile completely destroyed the Kenyans.

  Three times, I jetted. I writhed in powerful orgasms and waved my knife at Wilfred to keep him away. He stared with bulging eyes, and, after the third ejaculation had ceased, and my penis had drooped somewhat, shook his head.

  “You’re sick, man, real sick,” he mumbled.

  I came towards him. He backed away, hands out, and said, “You don’t want to fuck me with that knobkerrie, do you? Don’t, man! It’d split me wide open! Doc didn’t say anything about you being queer!”

  “Quit talking and scan that mountainside now,” I said.

  Since he could get a direct beam against the mountain, he switched off the balloon’s transceiver but left the balloon cruising around in a circle. At that moment, we heard the distant but unmistakable noise of a helicopter. It became louder in a minute. Wilfred switched the transceiver back on, loaded another rocket in the tube, and this time, at my order, punched the button. I felt nothing then. Apparently, only killings directly done by me brought on the aberrated reaction.

  The Kenyan, helicopter went up in a great bloom of fire.

  15

  The beam probed the mountainside. The slope looked like solid vegetation, but the view could be squeezed down with the beam so that we could see a square of two feet from a seeming height of ten feet. Thus, we could look between the trees. It took an hour before we located Doctor Caliban and his party. I could see the dark bronze head of the doctor near a tree. He was holding a metallic box with an antenna.

  “All right,” I said to Wilfred. “Blow the good doctor and his colleagues to kingdom come or wherever they’re going after death.”

  Wilfred howled and leaped at me. He tried a karate hand chop. Again, I grabbed the hand. I clamped down on it and jerked him past me and slammed him into a bank of instruments. He fell unconscious.

  The little white ball came out on the grid of the screen and stopped at the center lines, which were cross-haired on Caliban.

  Caliban looked up, and his mouth moved.

  His voice came out of a cabinet behind me.

  “Very well done, my dear Lord Grandrith. I underestimated you. I made certain that you were halfway up the mountain before I took off after you. I didn’t think you’d sneak all the way back down and attack my camp. But I was wrong!

  “How well you’ve performed! But not well enough! Don’t you know I have only to press a button on this transceiver, and all four vehicles will explode, along with the remaining missiles in your truck?”

  I froze. Caliban had been listening in, perhaps even watching, and I did not think that he was lying.

  I said, “If you blow me up, you also blow up Wilfred.”

  “Too bad!”

  Behind me, Wilfred groaned. He rose unsteadily, one arm limp, his eyes as red as if his brain had burst. He said, “Not you, Doc! You were the only good man I ever knew. I trusted you, Doc, even if you were a honky. I loved you, Doc, like I never loved a man before!”

  “You always did flap your big lips too much,” Caliban said. “Well, my lord, are you leaving peacefully, without pressing that button, or do I have to end it all now and cheat both of us?”

  “He means it! He’d kill us both!” Wilfred moaned. “Old Rivers and Simmons were right. Doc has turned evil! He’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde!”

  “Shut up, Wilfred,” Caliban said emotionlessly.

  “My lord, I have to blow up the trucks and jeeps in any event. One of my black colleagues, Ali Hamidu, has shinnied up a tree and scanned the scene with binoculars the power of which would astound even the scientists of this progressive century. He reports that the Albanian and his Arab mercenaries are sneaking up on you. They pulled the same trick you did, apparently. I think they spotted you when you came back down. Shame on you. Are you losing your touch? In any case, they see the light shining from the open roof of the camper.”

  I got out of the camper. Caliban’s voice said, “Get back here! They’ve got the camp surrounded. You couldn’t get two feet without being chopped down! I’m going to explode the two jeeps first, and then the supply truck! You stay in the camper until then, and take off under cover of the smoke! When you do, run like hell! The camper will be the biggest explosion by far!”

  An automatic rifle began firing about fifty yards away. The bullets stitched the dirt and then ran across a jeep. Somebody shouted in Arabic; I thought it was a command to hold the fire. Probably, it was Noli shouting, because he wanted to take me alive.

  I had no choice. I got back into the camper, the roof of which was closing up. Wilfred secured the door and the windows, and when the camper was tight, he said, “We’re protected by double walls with fiber glass and steel wool insulation. It’d take a direct hit from a shell to get us.”

  He was watching the screen, which showed about thirty armed men slowly advancing through the bush. I said, “Didn’t you see me when I was sneaking up on you?”

  Wilfred curled back his lips and clenched his teeth. Then he said, “You were born under a lucky star, bwana honky. I was watching a leopard over the next hill and I didn’t see you at all. When you got inside the camp, I couldn’t use the beam to sight you then. You were too close. Otherwise . . .”

  He paused, and then said, “I got orders not to kill you, anyway, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  The first explosion rocked the camper, but the noise was muffled. The second came almost immediately after. And the third two seconds later. The last must have been the supply truck. The camper seemed to lift up and tilt at the same time, and the blast half-deafened us. If it had not been for the thick insulation, our eardrums would have been blown out.

  Wilfred leaped up and opened the door and plunged out into the heavy smoke and the flames. He turned just before he disappeared and shouted at me. I could not hear him, but I could read his lips.

  “Split, mother!”

  16

  I ran after Wilfred, but our courses diverged. My goal was to get down the slope of the hill as far as possible and to put as many trees behind me as possible. Wilfred had said there were ten missiles in the truck yet with a total explosive forc
e equivalent to 400 pounds of TNT. There would not be much left of the hilltop after Caliban pressed the button.

  I was about forty yards down the hill, out of the direct path of the blast, the greater energy of which would go upward. Then I felt the pressure; I did not hear it. I flew forward; a tree sprang up; I became unconscious.

  When I regained my senses, I was still deaf. I could, however, hear the messages of pain in my eardrums, my head, and all my muscles.

  The smoke was just beginning to clear away. The hilltop was gone. Most of the trees, branchless, splintered, uprooted, were halfway down the hill. One lay a foot from me. A little more force behind it would have dropped the trunk, heavy as a great boulder, on my head.

  I rose slowly against the current of my pain. The moon was out behind the clouds now, and the sky seemed to be a peculiar shade of dark-blue. No doubt, I was furnishing the color, not the sky. The leaves of the trees were a sinister green, and the earth was a repulsive yellow-green. Everything was stretched, elongated, as if the world were a taut rubber band. The energy gathered in this band was waiting to be released when my hearing returned.

  I was unarmed and naked except for the belt with its sheath and the knife.

  Forty feet to my left, Wilfred lay face down. I turned him over. He had no visible wounds, but when I tore off his shirt, I saw on his lower back a bruise the size of a dinner plate. The bruise may have been caused by a truck wheel which lay about eight feet up the hill from him.

  He opened his eyes and said something. I could not hear him, and it was too dark to read his lips. I found a match-folder in his pocket and struck a match. It may have been a foolish thing to do, but I did not think there would be any living men around for some time, and I wanted to know what he was trying to say.

  The light was just enough for me to read his lips.

  “. . . not with a whimper but a bang, man . . . ain’t life the shits . . . tell that bronze cat . . . no fucking good . . . God’s a honky, you better believe it . . .” and then, “Mother!”

  The last was not, I’m sure, a truncated pejorative. It was the final appeal to one who had answered his first appeal.

  At that moment, I felt sad. If I had been able to know him under other circumstances, and if he could have abandoned all the masks, the mannerisms, the cliches which humans adopt for a group identity, then he and I might even have liked each other. But that was asking too much of most humans, and, moreover, I find that most humans have trouble being completely at ease when they’re with me.

  This, I suppose, is my fault.

  I left him with mouth and eyes open. Before noon, the flies would be buzzing in and out of the mouth and the vultures would have plucked the eyes from the sockets.

  The hilltop gave me nothing in the way of a weapon. I set off at a trot with the intention of going back up the mountain diagonally. I suspected that Caliban was even now racing down the mountain to check on my survival, unless he was able to see me through those super-binoculars. If I did lose him, I would do so only for a while. Eventually, he would be on my trail, for the simple reason that he was going where I was going. The two old men had told me that, although they probably did not know themselves. I doubted that Caliban would have said anything about the Nine to them, since it was forbidden. Also, he could take them only so far and then would have to go on alone. It was also forbidden to bring outsiders any closer than fifty miles to the caverns of the Nine.

  I was thinking about this, and wishing that my deafness would clear up soon, when a piece of bark flew off a tree about a foot to my left. If I had not been looking in that direction, I would have been unaware of it, and the shooter might have been more accurate the second time.

  So I thought at that moment. I dived to the ground and rolled beneath a bush in a slight hollow. When I peeked out, I saw a man, whose silhouette I recognized as the Albanian’s, shooting a man with a burnoose, with a rifle. The man fell forward and did not get up. I jumped up to run away but by then Noli was only thirty feet away. I put my arms up in the air; the automatic could not have missed. I don’t think he would have killed me, but he would have crippled me with bullets in the legs.

  I did not know how he and the Arab had survived. They must have been further down the hill when the first jeep went up and they had managed to get away before the other explosions got to them. He said something to me. I shook my head and pointed at my ears. He pointed at his own, and I knew he was deaf, too. The Arab must have been deaf, and Noli had probably shouted at him that I was to be taken alive. Undoubtedly, the Arab had received orders to this effect more than once. But, shaken by the explosions, perhaps eager to revenge his fellows, he had fired at me. Noli was not close enough to knock him out with the rifle, so he had been forced to kill him.

  He had to tie my hands and to do this required my cooperation, which I was not likely to give. He solved his problem by hitting me over the head with the barrel of the rifle. I ducked and so reduced some of the impact of the blow, but not enough.

  When I awoke, my head ached as if it had sucked in every pain in the area for fifty miles around. My brain seemed to throb like a mangled and infected hand. My eyes hurt as if the optic nerves had been extruded into the eye-balls. My hands were connected behind me with what I later determined was a pair of handcuffs. A hangman’s noose was around my neck, and the other end of the rope was tied to the handcuff’s chain. My arms had been hauled up almost as far as they could behind me with the result that I pulled on the rope and choked myself unless I kept my arms up high. In this state, I could not test the strength of the handcuff’s chain without strangling myself.

  Later, Noli would remove the rope during the daytime, but at night he always replaced it.

  Noli made signs which told me what he wanted. I would lead him to the source of the gold. And I would also tell him, when I was able, the secret of my juvenescence.

  He was taking seriously what most people considered to be a tale of fantasy. He seemed to have done his research well, however, and was convinced that I had a hoard of gold somewhere in this area and that I really was 80 years old.

  The facts about me—some, anyway—are available to certain people. The secret archives of many governments and some very powerful individuals contain pages of facts and of speculations, about me. These exist in Washington, London, Peking, Moscow, Paris, Rome, and other places. I know about them because the Nine told me of them.

  Noli was either an agent of the Communist government of his country or a private agent. Or he was the former and had been sent to find the gold and was looking for the elixir for himself. I doubt that his government really believed in the elixir.

  I transmitted to him my willingness to lead him to the gold. He was elated at this, and, at the same time, suspicious. He seemed to think I should have undergone at least a modicum of torture before agreeing to his demands.

  I tried to tell him I did not think the torture was worth it, but I failed. He gave me the signal to precede him, and we went on down the hillside and then began climbing the mountain.

  By dawn, we were near the top. Noli was puffing and panting. His mouth hung open, his chest rose and fell rapidly, sweat silvered his face and enormous moustachioes, and sweat blackened his clothes. He was in good condition for a man of fifty-five, which I estimated his age to be. Even a young athlete would have been under a strain to keep up with my pace. Time and again, Noli jammed his rifle in my back and when I turned around, he gestured that he wanted to rest.

  Twice, we ate and drank. He carried a canteen of water and had three cans of spam in his pocket. He gave me half a can while he ate one. I wondered what he intended to do after we ran out of food. He might be able to shoot some game, but he would dislike to do this, since it would advertise our presence.

  Nightfall found us on the western side of the next mountain two hundred yards below the peak. My ankles were tied with a rope and my handcuffed hands were also tied to a rope the other end of which was around the trunk of a slim tree. T
he position was uncomfortable. My bowels had moved during the night, and I was able to get only a few inches from the mess, and I had to piss down my leg. Also, it got cold and wet. Mists and then chilling dew covered us. I have been used to worse much of my life. I did not intend to try to escape the first night, unless an irresistible opportunity came along. I would sleep and gather my strength while Noli slept uneasily and in much discomfort. He awoke frequently and sat up to inspect me or prowled around for a while before trying to seize a few more minutes of sleep. Or so he told me the next day. I slept very well.

  Dawn was no more red-eyed than he, and it was much fresher.

  He stood above me and pissed on me. Probably as revenge for having rested while he suffered and also part of his psychological warfare. It did not bother me. The urine was warm and felt pleasant, and I have been pissed on by others, all now as dead and as cold as last night’s urine.

  He untied the ropes and let me get up. I had to piss then. He watched me with an enigmatic look. But his penis was still hanging out of his pants, and, as he watched me, it swelled and grew hard. He looked down and then up at me and smiled. He then forced it within his pants and gestured for me to lead. I knew what he was thinking. The Albanians have been heavily influenced by the Turks, although it is not necessary to enlist history to account for certain attitudes. There are enough Enver Nolis in West Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, none originating from Turkish influences.

  At noon, we were at the foot of the mountain. He ate another can of spam, and I got a fourth of another. My stomach was growling, and I could feel my strength evaporating. My hearing was by then almost completely returned, and I could hear his stomach when he was close. He was hungry, despite getting the lion’s share of the food.

  The next morning, he was in worse condition. Hunger was beginning to erode him. He needed more food than he was getting even if he had been resting, but the loss of energy in climbing the mountains and in loss of sleep was great. At midnoon, his hunger got the best of his desire for concealment. A mountain pangolin ran out from behind a bush as we were going across a small plateau which was so rocky it contained less vegetation than other areas. The beast rolled over and over at the impact of the .38. The shot came from behind me and was unexpected. I jumped and whirled. He smiled. He had food and he also had discovered that I was not as deaf as I had pretended.