Free The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

a doll and drove a needle through it. MacDiarmid realized he was leveling a curse. The doll wore a Santa Claus suit. MacDiarmid could not help laughing then and Conrad laughed his silent laugh, too, more, MacDiarmid thought, because he was laughing than because Conrad found it funny. Zapata stuck more pins in the dolls and MacDiarmid relaxed, slumped against the wall.
    "The dumb fuck. We're in the wrong uniforms. He can't hurt us."
    The President still rambled on, spouting numbers and plans and condolences and well-wishes and one-liners. His brisk, clear speech formed a counterpoint to Zapata's mumblings.
    Suddenly MacDiarmid knew, knew with chilling certainty, that the President was combating Zapata's magic with his own voodoo, that his talk of technology and ships and planes and strategy was crowding out the black magic, protecting all the soldiers in danger.
    "I hope the President has the balls for it," he said, to hear himself say it. The sweat was dripping into MacDiarmid's eyes—again. He saw the boy's pale face in the moment before the M-16 ripped him apart.
    "It's hot," he said to Conrad. "Too damn hot."
    Conrad said nothing.
    On the TV, Zapata scowled and threw the doll across the room, off the monitor. Conrad nudged MacDiarmid in the ribs, a feather-light touch. Through the window, MacDiarmid could sense the night growing thinner , as if some vast presence, blotting out the stars, had stared in at them, until Zapata dismissed it with the same flick of his wrist that dismissed the doll.
    Zapata took out another doll and another, until he had a dozen on the table in front of him, none with eyes or mouths, and all of them looking like a dog had chewed on them. The drug lord stitched them back together and then stitched each doll to the next until they formed one creature. The President began spouting instructions for microwave ovens—a spell with nonsense words—and the press began to fidget. They wanted world affairs, not cooking, but the President, his speech slurring, plowed on. The Secretary of State, visibly worried, came to stand behind the President. MacDiarmid felt nervousness uncoil from deep inside him. Zapata grinned. He held up the dolls. An aide poured blood over them. Zapata's eyes, small and dark, looked directly into him.
    Then the power clicked off.
    But Zapata's face hovered in the darkness of the TV screen and MacDiarmid heard the woman's voice saying, out of the night, "Soldiers. In the red lights. We love you. We love you..."
    It was only after about ten seconds that MacDiarmid's legs responded to his will and lifted him up and he ran, out of the shop and into the street. Conrad followed close behind.
    On the street, a mob blocked the way: a hundred or so civilians armed with machetes and rocks and baseball bats. Conrad trained his M-16 on them and, after a moment's hesitation, so did MacDiarmid.
    Silent but for the tramp of feet, the mob began to advance. Their faces were pasty white and their expressions blank. Conrad tensed, standing his ground, but MacDiarmid motioned him to step back.
    "Too many, Conrad. There're too many"
    He did not have the stomach for more carnage.
    Conrad glanced over at MacDiarmid and slid the safety off of his M-16. MacDiarmid felt a compulsion to do the same.
    From behind them, MacDiarmid heard, "Santa Claus? Feliz Navidad, Santa Claus?": the whisper of a death song, the echo of a cry from deep below the surface of a lake.
    Conrad began to shake when he heard the low, quavery voice.
    They turned together, as one, as they had in Guatemala, before MacDiarmid had put the bullet through Conrad's head and left him to die.
    Conrad retched. But MacDiarmid laughed at first, for not only had each child been stitched back together, but they had been stitched to each other so that they formed a vast tableau of withered and decaying flesh, with a hundred eyes and fifty mouths, legs falling over legs, arms grappling, flailing, and still, somehow, moving forward, toward them. The