Free The Magdalena Curse by F.G. Cottam Page B

confounded nature.
    ‘What happened to us?’ he said to Peterson, when Peterson proffered a mug of coffee from the pot he’d just brewed.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Peterson said, on the ground, on his haunches, staring at nothing. He was like that for so long that Hunter thought he would offer nothing more. Then he said, ‘Hypnotic suggestion might have been a part of it.’
    Hunter glanced briefly towards the little tent. ‘What hypnotist possesses the power to make you consume your own hands?’
    Peterson grimaced and he turned and looked Hunter full in the face. ‘I’m as clueless as you are, pal. I’ve had guys I’ve rated very seriously tell me they’ve been up close and personal with UFOs.’
    ‘We all have,’ Hunter said.
    ‘Unless we were set up, unless it was some kind of Pentagon-inspired behavioural experiment, then I honestly haven’t a fucking clue.’
    Hunter blinked up towards the blue sky. The birds were very loud. It was a vivid day, even beautiful, depending on your frame of mind. ‘Rodriguez is going to die, isn’t he?’
    ‘We haven’t the drugs to treat him even if we had the know-how,’ Peterson said. ‘This is an operation so covert we don’t have any comms equipment at all. The plan is to walk back to a base over the border in Brazil. It’s fifty miles, give or take. He’s running a high fever. I checked on him just now. Both wounds are infected, unsurprisingly, given how they were inflicted. We don’t even know how much blood he lost. I’d estimate more than he could afford to. So, yeah, I’d say the Major’s chances of survival are slim.’
    ‘Unless we carry him down to Magdalena,’ Hunter said, ‘which is what we should have done in the first place.’
    It meant blowing their non-existent cover. It meant compromising themselves completely and exposing their failed mission to an always curious world. But what Peterson thought of the suggestion, Hunter never discovered, because at that moment, Major Rodriguez emerged from unconsciousness and cried out aloud to them.
    The air in the small tent was suffocating, gangrenous. Rodriguez was sweating and shivering and porcelain pale. They had cleaned the blood from his face. They had bound his wrists to his thighs for fear that he might raise them and, unprepared for it, see the damage done.
    ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, when they entered the tent and squatted at his side. ‘I cannot feel my hands. I cannot feel them at all.’
    ‘What do you remember, Sir?’ Peterson said, gently. He trickled water into the Major’s mouth from the bottle taken from his belt.
    Rodriguez swallowed water and laughed. ‘A dream,’ he said. ‘An hallucination. I happened on two witches conferring and one of them cursed me. She cursed us all. She did so in a Coptic dialect so ancient I only half understood it. But most of it I got.’
    ‘I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t,’ Hunter said. ‘With languages, Sir, you have a prodigious gift.’
    ‘I can’t feel my hands, Captain Hunter. Why is that?’
    ‘It’s just the morphine, Major. It’s numbness only. Tell us about the curse.’
    Rodriguez frowned, recollecting. His breath was coming only in shallow gasps. It was an effort for him. He was not wholly aware. That was a blessing. He was unaware in the cramped tent of the rising stink of his own corruption. ‘She said I would not sit at the piano and help teach my daughter to play again. She said you, Peterson, would avoid the sea or pay for the pleasure it gives you with your life.’
    ‘And me?’
    ‘That was most curious of all, Captain Hunter. She said that your progeny would commune with the dead. And your progeny would be afflicted with the gift of prophecy.’
    ‘Afflicted with a gift?’
    ‘Her words, Captain,’ Rodriguez said. He smiled. The effort was enormous. ‘Not my clumsy translation, I assure you. I merely repeat the contradictory riddle of the sorceress.’
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘And just a dream,’ Rodriguez said.