“Can you circle just once more!” Valerie Greene asked. She was tying nooses now.
Kirby, a bit annoyed, banked Cynthia hard and made a gliding swooping turn over the tumbled land below. “You’re the one says it’s urgent.”
“I just want to be sure.” Noose in hand, she peered down at that disorderly maze of greens and browns. “Yes! There’s the stream where I— That’s the stream from this morning. See it?”
Kirby rolled Cynthia over and came back, while Valerie clung open-mouthed to her seat. “Got it,” he said. “Due north from there they said?”
“One—” Silence.
Kirby looked over and saw her distress. “Sorry,” he said, and turned Cynthia right side up. “One hour north,” he said. “On foot.”
“Yes,” Valerie said.
The false Gurkhas saw the people looking toward the trail up from the road, and unlimbered their Sterling submachine guns. The villagers, already sensing something wrong about these soldiers, now drew back, wide-eyed, and everybody in the small clearing grew silent, except the female piglet, still squealing and shrilling about the indignity that had been done her.
High above, the sky was clear and blue. Thick brush and great trees surrounded the clearing, arching high overhead, and smaller trees had been left to stand beside the huts for shade. Except in the very center, where steady sunlight shone on their plantings, the settlement was dappled with rays reaching through the trees, angling down to touch with creamy light this person, that hut, that finger resting gently on a trigger. At the narrow end of the clearing, a patch of hotter, brighter light backed by fuzzy greens and yellows showed the top of the trail up from the road.
An Espejo girl, eight years old, picked up the piglet and cradled it in her arms. Her thudding heartbeat calmed the piglet, which grew quiet.
A straggling group of eight people, hot and sweaty and sun-dazzled, appeared at the end of the silent clearing and came slowly in, looking around themselves.
Vernon saw the Gurkhas, saw them holding the machine guns, and moaned as he dropped to his knees, unaware of the journalists staring at him in astonishment. “No,” he said, too late.
“The last one,” Valerie said, tightening the final noose on the final neck.
“Good.”
The hurried work finished, Valerie for the first time had a chance to actually look at these things. She held a small statue in each hand, the identical little evil creatures capering there with the nooses around their necks. “These—” she said, and frowned. “Are you sure these are real?”
“Van parked there, in from the blacktop road. See it?”
She saw it, partway into the green jungle, white roof gleaming, front of the vehicle pointed west, away from the road. “This must be it!”
“And the visitors are here already.”
Valerie clutched tightly to the Zotzilaha Chimalmans as the plane banked and dropped low to the ground.
The sound of a passing plane was drowned by the chatter. Nine-millimeter bullets stuttered across the clearing, chopping Scottie’s legs out from under him and punching Vernon’s stomach three times, in a line just above his belt. People screamed and ran, and three villagers fell bleeding.
The plane was louder, not passing after all. Disturbed at their work, the false Gurkhas looked up as the plane roared through the clearing, sideways, right wingtip pointing down at them as though to say, “You. I see you.”
“Throw them!” Kirby yelled. “Throw them!”
Valerie was too busy to answer. She was lying on her side, against the side wall of the plane, elbow on the fixed part of the window. As quickly as she could, she pushed the little statues one at a time through the window flap.
Zotzilaha Chimalman. Out of the plane he fell, time after time, swathed in cotton material, the cloth pulling away in the breeze of his falling. The noose around his neck was made of four strings, tied to four edges of the cloth; enough of a parachute for such a little devil.
Two false Gurkhas lifted their Sterlings, but the plane was already through the clearing and gone, circling. The people were running into the jungle, the journalists lay flat in the sunlight. Creatures floated down out of the sky.
Cynthia made a hard, tight circle through the air, left wing straight up and right wing straight down, and once more she crashed through the clearing. More demons plummeted from her side.
A false Gurkha aimed his Sterling at one of the things parachuting toward him. He peered through the metal arch of the foresight protector, focusing on the gray-brown figure in the air. He recognized it. A great fright struck him and he stared, forgetting to shoot.
Vernon, curled in a tight ball around the agony in his stomach, wept, and blamed the Colonel for everything.
A false Gurkha clutched a statue out of the air, held it in his hand, stared at it in disbelief. Dirt clung to it, as though it had just come from the grave; some of the dirt was now on his hand. Suddenly, he flung the thing away. He thought his hand was burning. Stepping back, his foot rolled on a statue on the ground; it tried to trip him, bite him, bring him down. He shrieked, threw away his Sterling, and ran.
“There aren’t any more!” Valerie cried.
Kirby lifted Cynthia up and away. Valerie tried to see back to the village. “Wait! What’s happening back there?”
“Give them a minute to think about it. Then we’ll go back and see.”
What was this airplane? How had it come to be exactly where the false Gurkhas were, exactly at the moment when they were starting their work? Had they been betrayed? Were other enemies on the way?
These were the rational problems, the sensible questions, the meaningful dilemmas. They were as nothing beside the creatures hanging in the sky.
Twenty Zotzilahas floating down through the dappled air, falling one by one to the ground, gathering their cotton cloaks about themselves, grimacing and winking and grinning at the false Gurkhas, three more of whom flung away their guns and ran for the jungle.
“Come back!” the leader shouted, and fired after them, missing.
Another, backing away from the devils, saw the leader turn eyes and gun in his direction and he fired first, killing the leader 11 times.
Two more murderers in Gurkha uniform ran away into the jungle, these keeping their weapons.
Valerie stared back at the anonymous green. She wanted to see. Fretfully, she said, “Could they be that afraid of clay?”
“Their ancestors were.”