Read Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead for Free Online Page B

but that knowledge drew nearer. He would uncover it soon.
    For now? He needed to rest. He was exhausted.
    The hut on the edge of the clearing beckoned. It was rude—walls, a roof, a straw mattress on a new bamboo floor already half eaten by mites—but it would serve. It would keep off the rain when it fell, shade him from the sun. Nothing alive, no bug, no animal, no man would bother him as he slept and regained his strength. Later, one of the Children of the Potion would come with food, and to attend to his other needs. He was old, but having a young, pretty, and pleasingly plump woman come to bathe his face, rub his body with scented oils, and do anything else he might deem necessary—anything at all? That was part of his power, albeit only the smallest part.
    There was an old saying on the islands: If your daughters are pretty or your sons handsome, best hide them away, lest Boukman claim them for his own . . .
    He grinned. It was true—he liked them attractive. Many of the young and beautiful had died suddenly, for no apparent reason, and come back to serve as Boukman’s slaves. That was the way of things when you were a bokor. You took what—and who—you wanted.
    Later, after he was rested, he would be ready to deal with the white men and whatever it was they had been sent to bring him.

    In the dream, Boukman was running, and his steps were slow, as if his bare feet were sunk deep in a thick mire. As hard as he tried, he could only manage a pace akin to a slow walk.
    Something was behind him, unseen, and it was coming for him.
    Though he could not see it, he knew it was a monster beyond measure, a thing of such vile composition that to behold it would curdle your blood. To be touched by it would be infinitely worse, a horror beyond any a sane man could imagine. Gibbering madness for ten times ten million years.
    In the dream, Boukman was seventeen again, a man, but not one of enough strength to stop the terror chasing him. His machete was made of rubber, his gun held only cotton bullets, and his powers were small. What use was a love potion against the thing that wanted his soul? How could he possibly survive?
    Even though he knew it was a dream, he felt the fear.
    And the answer, he knew, was that as he stood, he could not.
    But: There was hope, a faint ray that shined down supernally from the heavens. There was a way. A way to become more than he was, and it was in front of him, just . . . there, ahead . . .
    Like the monster behind him, what lay before was unseen, and he could not fathom what it was, only that it was his salvation. If he could get to it before the thing chasing him, if he could steep himself in whatever it was, he would have the power to stop it, to defeat it, and to become more than a man—more than any man had been or would ever be . . .
    He pushed himself to move faster, his lungs laboring, his muscles aching, his heart pounding close to its bursting point—
    —to no avail. He was a fly in hardening amber, wading through glue, and the evil behind him kept gaining. He felt it well over him, a malignant black wave about to crash down and engulf his soul—
    Boukman awoke with a start, sitting up with a yell stillborn on his lips, sweat soaking the thin sheet upon which he lay.
    The Dream. Come to warn him. Come to tell him there was something for him to find that would help, as it always did when he heeded it. Attention must be paid, and if it was done properly, it would reward him.
    It had to be Marie and her white men—her imen blan. Nothing else was new.
    He would have to examine it as a boy did an ant under a magnifying glass. And he would have to take care that he did not focus the sun’s light into a burning ray that would destroy the insect before he learned its secrets . . .

SEVEN
    M ARIE HAD BEEN right about the place being a jungle. There was a strip of beach, a few palm trees, and then a wall of rain forest that looked like, well, a wall. Most of Haiti had been logged, Indy