William Sanders - Ninekiller and the Netherworld.pdf - William Sanders - widez2

As in Creatures of Light and Darkness, William Sanders’s tale

demonstrates the power that the ancient Egyptian gods still hold for us,

long past the days when their kingdoms became dust.

NINEKILLER AND THE NETERW

WILLIAM SANDERS

JESSE NINEKILLER WAS FIVE THOUSAND FEET ABOVE THE

Egyptian desert when his grandfather spoke to him. He was startled but not

absolutely astonished, even though his grandfather had been dead for

almost thirty years. This wasn’t the first time this had happened.

The first time had been way back in ‘72, near Cu Chi, where a

brand-new Warrant Officer Ninekiller had been about to put a not-so-new

Bell HU-1 into its descent toward a seemingly quiet landing zone. He had

just begun to apply downward pressure on the collective pitch stick when

the voice had sounded in his ear, cutting clear through the engine racket

and the heavy wop-wop-wop of the rotor:

“Jagasesdesdi, sgilisi! You don’t want to go down there right now.”

Actually it was only later, thinking back, that Jesse re-called the words

and put them together. It was a few seconds before he even realized it had

been Grandfather’s voice. At the moment it was simply the shock of hearing

a voice inside his helmet speaking Oklahoma Cherokee that froze his

hands on the controls. But that was enough; by the time he got unstuck and

resumed the descent, the other three Hueys in the flight were already

dropping rap-idly earthward, leaving Jesse well above and behind, clumsy

with embarrassment and manhandling the Huey like a first-week trainee as

he struggled to catch up. Badly shaken, too; he didn’t think he’d been in

Nam long enough to be hearing voices…

Then the tree line at the edge of the LZ exploded with gunfire and the

first two Hueys went up in great balls of orange flame and the third flopped

sideways into the ground like a huge dying hummingbird, and only Jesse,

still out of range of the worst of the metal, was able to haul his ship clear.

And all the way back to base the copilot kept asking, “How did you know,

man? How did you know?”

* * * *

That was the first time, and the only time for a good many years; and

eventually Jesse convinced himself it had all been his imagination. But then

there came a day when Jesse, now flying for an offshore oil outfit out of

east Texas, got into a lively afternooner with a red-headed woman at her

home on the outskirts of Corpus Christi; and finally she got up and headed

for the bathroom, and Jesse, after enjoying the sight of her naked white

bottom disappearing across the hall, decided what he needed now was a

little nap.

And had just dropped off into pleasantly exhausted sleep when the

voice woke him, sharp and urgent: “Wake up, chooch! Grab your things and

get out of there, nula!”

He sat up, blinking and confused. He was still blinking when he heard

the car pull into the driveway; but he got a lot less confused, became highly

alert in fact, when the redhead called from the bathroom, “That’ll be my

hus-band. Don’t worry, he’s cool.”

Not buying that for a second, Jesse was already out of bed and

snatching up his scattered clothes. He sprinted ballocky-bare-assed down

the hall and out the back door and across the scrubby lawn, while an angry

shout behind him, followed by a metallic clack-clack and then an

unrea-sonably loud bang, indicated that the husband wasn’t being even a

little bit cool. There were more bangs and some-thing popped past Jesse’s

head as he made it to his car, and after he got back to his own place he

discovered a couple of neat holes, say about forty-five hundredths of an

inch in diameter, in the Camaro’s right rear fender.

* * * *

In the years that followed there were other incidents, not quite so wild but

just as intense. Like the time Grand-father’s voice woke him in the middle of

the night in time to escape from a burning hotel in Bangkok, or when it

stopped him from going into a Beirut cafe a couple of minutes before a

Hezbollah bomb blew the place to rubble. So even though Grandfather’s

little visitations never got to be very frequent, when they did happen Jesse

tended to pay attention.

As in the present instance, which bore an uneasy simi-larity to the

first. The helicopter now was a Hughes 500D, smaller than the old Huey

and a hell of a lot less work to drive, and Egypt definitely didn’t look a bit like

Nam, but it was still close enough to make the hairs on Jesse’s neck come

smartly to attention when that scratchy old voice in his ear (his left ear, for

some reason it was always the left one) said, “Ni, sgilisi! This thing’s about

to quit on you.”

Jesse’s eyes dropped instantly to the row of warning lights at the top

of the instrument panel, then to the dial gauges below. Transmission oil

pressure and temperature, fuel level, battery temperature, engine and rotor

rpm, tur-bine outlet temperature, engine oil pressure and

tempera-ture—there really were a hell of a lot of things that could go wrong

with a helicopter, when you thought about it— everything seemed normal,

all the little red and amber squares dark, all the needles where they were

supposed to be. Overhead, the five-bladed rotor fluttered steadily, and

there was no funny feedback from the controls.

Beside him, in the right seat, the man who called him-self Bradley and

who was supposed to be some kind of archaeologist said, “Something the

matter?”

Jesse shrugged. Grandfather’s voice said, “Screw him. Listen. Make

about a quarter turn to the right. See that big brown rock outcrop, off yonder

to the north, looks sort of like a fist? Take a line on that.”

Jesse didn’t hesitate, even though the lights and needles still swore

there was nothing wrong. He pressed gently on the cyclic stick and toed the

right tail-rotor pedal to bring the nose around. As the Hughes wheeled to

the right the man called Bradley said sharply, “What do you think you’re

doing? No course changes till I say—”

Just like that, just as Jesse neutralized the controls to steady the

Hughes on its new course, the engine stopped. There was no preliminary

loss of power or change of sound: one second the Allison turbine was

howling away back there and the next it wasn’t. Just in case nobody had

noticed, the red engine-out light began blinking, while the warning horn at

the top of the instrument console burst into a pulsating, irritating hoot.

Immediately Jesse shoved the collective all the way down, letting the

main rotor go into autorotation. Under his breath he said, “Damn, eduda,

how come you always cut it so close?”

“What? What the hell?” Bradley sounded more pissed off than

seriously scared. “What’s happening, Ninekiller?”

Jesse didn’t bother answering. He was watching the air-speed needle

and easing back on the cyclic, slowing the Hughes to its optimum speed for

maximum power-off gliding range. When the needle settled to eighty knots

and the upper tach showed a safe 410 rotor rpm he exhaled, not loudly,

and glanced at Bradley. “Hey,” he said, and pointed one-fingered at the

radio without taking his hand off the cyclic grip. “Call it in?”

“Negative.” Bradley didn’t hesitate. “No distress calls. Maintain radio

silence.”

Right, Jesse thought. And that flight plan we filed was bogus as a

tribal election, too. Archaeologist my Native American ass.

But there was no time to waste thinking about spooky passengers.

Jesse studied the desert floor, which was rising to meet them at a

distressing rate. It looked pretty much like the rest of Egypt, which seemed

to consist of miles and miles and miles of simple doodly-squat, covered

with rocks and grayish-yellow sand. At least this part didn’t have those big

ripply dunes, which might look neat but would certainly make a forced

landing almost unbear-ably fascinating.

“Get set,” he told Bradley. “This might be a little rough.”

For a minute there it seemed the warning had been unnecessary.

Jesse made a school-perfect landing, flaring out at seventy-five feet with

smooth aft pressure on the cyclic, leveling off at about twenty and bringing

the collec-tive back up to cushion the final descent. As the skids touched

down he thought: damn, I’m good.

Then the left skid sank into a pocket of amazingly soft sand and the

Hughes tilted irresistibly, not all the way onto its side but far enough for the

still-moving rotor blades to beat themselves to death against the ground;

and things did get a little rough.

When the lurching and slamming and banging finally stopped Bradley

said, “Great landing, Ninekiller.” He began undoing his safety harness. “Oh,

well, any landing you can walk away from is a good one. Isn’t that what you

pilots say?”

Jesse, already out of his own harness and busy flipping switches

off—there was no reason to do that now, but fixed habits were what kept

you alive—thought of a couple of things one pilot would like to say. But he

kept his mouth shut and waited while Bradley got the right door open, his

own being jammed against the ground. They clambered out and stood for a

moment looking at the Hughes and then at their surroundings.

“Walk away is what we got to do, I guess,” Bradley observed. He took

off his mesh-back cap and rubbed his head, which was bald except for a

couple of patches around the ears. Maybe to compensate, he wore a bristly

mustache that, combined with a snubby nose and big tombstone teeth,

made him look a little like Teddy Roose-velt. His skin was reddish-pink and

looked as if it would burn easily. Jesse wondered how long he was going to

last in the desert sun.

He climbed back into the Hughes—Jesse started to warn him about

the risk of fire but decided what the hell—and rummaged around in back,

emerging a few minutes later with a green nylon duffel bag, which he slung

over his shoulder. “Well,” he said, jumping down, “guess we bet-ter look at

the map.”

Grandfather’s voice said, “Keep going the way you were. Few miles

on, over that rise where the rock sticks out, there’s water.”

Jesse said, “Wado, eduda,” and then, as Bradley looked strangely at

him, “Come on. This way.”

Bradley snorted. “Long way from home, aren’t you, to be pulling that

Indian crap? I mean, it’s not like you’re an Arab.” But then, when Jesse

started walking away without looking back, “Oh, Christ, why not? Lead on,

Tonto.”

* * * *

Grandfather’s few miles turned out to be very long ones, and, despite the

apparent flatness of the desert, uphill all the way. The ground was hard as

concrete and littered with sharp rocks. Stretches of yielding sand slowed

their feet and filled their shoes. It was almost three hours before they

reached the stony crest of the rise and saw the place.

Or a place; it didn’t look at all as Jesse had expected. Somehow he

had pictured a movie-set oasis, a little island of green in the middle of this

sandy nowhere, with palm trees and a pool of cool clear water. Maybe even

some friendly Arabs, tents and camels and accommodating belly dancers .

. . okay, he didn’t really expect that last part, but surely there ought to be

something besides more God-damned rocks and sand. Which, at first, was

all he could see.

Bradley, however, let out a dry-lipped whistle. “How did you know,

Ninekiller? Hate to admit it, but I’m impressed.”

William Sanders - Ninekiller and the Netherworld.pdf

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