From the Heart of Darkness

by David Drake

  The three travellers began groping through the night, through the smoke and the screaming. “I don’t think we’ve ever checked whether the Oconee plant was still operable,” Smith said. “It’d be a good time to see.”

  Kozinski shrugged. “We ought to get back to England some time. It’s been too long since we were there.”

  “No, there’s time for that,” Smith argued. “Nobody there is going to build a fission plant as long as there’s one man left to tell what we did when we found the one at Harewell.”

  A pair of burning buildings lighted their path, sweeping the air clear with an angry updraft. Kozinski squinted, then reached out his hand to halt Ssu-ma. “Your birthmark,” he said, pointing to the star-shaped blotch beneath the girl’s left breast. “It used to be on the right side.”

  She shrugged. “The rocket just now, I suppose.”

  Kozinski frowned. “Don’t you see? If we can change at all, we can die some day.”

  “Sure,” Smith agreed with a nod. “I’ve got some white hairs on my temples. My hair was solid brown the … when I went to New York.”

  “We’ll live as long as the world needs us,” Ssu-ma said quietly, touching each of the men and guiding them onward toward the trail back through the mountains. The steam and the night wrapped them, muffled them. Through it her words came: “After all, what sort of men would there be in the world if it weren’t for men like us?”

  And all three of them spoke the final line of the joke, their voices bright with remembered humor: “Men like us!”

  SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE

  “He was out in the hall just a minute ago, sir,” the pinched-faced WAC said, looking up from her typewriter in irritation. “You can’t mistake his face.”

  Capt. Richmond shrugged and walked out of the busy office. Blinking in the dim marble were a dozen confused civilians, bussed in for their pre-induction physicals. No one else was in the hallway. The thick-waisted officer frowned, then thought to open the door of the men’s room. “Sergeant Morzek?” he called.

  Glass clinked within one of the closed stalls and a deep voice with a catch in it grumbled, “Yeah, be right with you.” Richmond thought he smelled gin.

  “You the other ghoul?” the voice questioned as the stall swung open. Any retort Richmond might have made withered when his eyes took in the cadaverous figure in ill-tailored greens. Platoon sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves, and below them a longer row of service stripes than the captain remembered having seen before. God, this walking corpse might have served in World War II! Most of the ribbons ranked above the sergeant’s breast pockets were unfamiliar, but Richmond caught the little V for valor winking in the center of a silver star. Even in these medal-happy days in Southeast Asia they didn’t toss many of those around.

  The sergeant’s cheeks were hollow, his fingers grotesquely thin where they rested on top of the door or clutched the handles of his zippered AWOL bag. Where no moles squatted, his skin was as white as a convict’s; but the moles were almost everywhere, hands and face, dozens and scores of them, crowding together in welted obscenity.

  The sergeant laughed starkly. “Pretty, aren’t I? The docs tell me I got too much sun over there and it gave me runaway warts. Hell, four years is enough time for it to.”

  “Umm,” Richmond grunted in embarrassment, edging back into the hall to have something to do. “Well, the car’s in back … if you’re ready, we can see the Lunkowskis.”

  “Yeah, Christ,” the sergeant said, “that’s what I came for, to see the Lunkowskis.” He shifted his bag as he followed the captain and it clinked again. Always before, the other man on the notification team had been a stateside officer like Richmond himself. He had heard that a few low-casualty outfits made a habit of letting whoever knew the dead man best accompany the body home, but this was his first actual experience with the practice. He hoped it would be his last.

  Threading the green Ford through the heavy traffic of the city center, Richmond said, “I take it Pfc Lunkowski was one of your men?”

  “Yeah, Stevie-boy was in my platoon for about three weeks,” Morzek agreed with a chuckle. “Lost six men in that time and he was the last. Six out of twenty-nine, not very damn good, was it?”

  “You were under heavy attack?”

  “Hell, no, mostly the dinks were letting us alone for a change. We were out in the middle of War Zone C, you know, most Christ-bitten stretch of country you ever saw. No dinks, no trees—they’d all been defoliated. Not a damn thing but dust and each others company.”

  “Well, what did happen?” Richmond prompted impatiently. Traffic had thinned somewhat among the blocks of old buildings and he began to look for house numbers.

  “Oh, mostly they just died,” Morzek said. He yawned alcoholically. “Stevie, now, he got blown to hell by a grenade.”

  Richmond had learned when he was first assigned to notification duty not to dwell on the ways his … missions had died. The possibilities varied from unpleasant to ghastly. He studiously avoided saying anything more to the sergeant beside him until he found the number he wanted. “One-sixteen. This must be the Lunkowskis’.”

  Morzek got out on the curb side, looking more skeletal than before in the dappled sunlight. He still held his AWOL bag.

  “You can leave that in the car,” Richmond suggested. “I’ll lock up.”

  “Naw, I’ll take it in,” the sergeant said as he waited for Richmond to walk around the car. “You know, this is every damn thing I brought from Nam? They didn’t bother to open it at Travis, just asked me what I had in it. ‘A quart of gin,’ I told’em, ‘but I won’t have it long,’ and they waved me through to make my connections. One advantage to this kind of trip.”

  A bell chimed far within the house when Richmond pressed the button. It was cooler than he had expected on the pine-shaded porch. Miserable as these high, dark old houses were to heat, the design made a world of sense in the summer.

  A light came on inside. The stained glass window left of the door darkened and a latch snicked open. “Please to come in,” invited a soft-voiced figure hidden by the dark oak panel. Morzek grinned inappropriately and led the way into the hall, brightly lighted by an electric chandelier.

  “Mr. Lunkowski?” Richmond began to the wispy little man who had admitted them. “We are—”

  “But yes, you are here to tell us when Stefan shall come back, are you not?” Lunkowski broke in. “Come into the sitting room, please, Anna and my daughter Rose are there.”

  “Ah, Mr. Lunkowski,” Richmond tried to explain as he followed, all too conscious of the sardonic grin on Morzek’s face, “you have been informed by telegram that Pfc Lunkowski was—”

  “Was killed, yes,” said the younger of the two red-haired women as she got up from the sofa. “But his body will come back to us soon, will he not? The man on the telephone said…?”

  She was gorgeous, Richmond thought, cool and assured, half smiling as her hair cascaded over her left shoulder like a thick copper conduit. Disconcerted as he was by the whole situation, it was a moment before he realized that Sgt. Morzek was saying, “Oh, the coffin’s probably at the airport now, but there’s nothing in it but a hundred and fifty pounds of gravel. Did the telegram tell you what happened to Stevie?”

  “Sergeant!” Richmond shouted. “You drunken—”

  “Oh, calm down, Captain,” Morzek interrupted bleakly. “The Lunkowskis, they understand. They want to hear the whole story, don’t they?”

  “Yes.” There was a touch too much sibilance in the word as it crawled from the older woman, Stefan Lunkowski’s mother. Her hair was too grizzled now to have more than a touch of red in it, enough to rust the tight ringlets clinging to her skull like a helmet of mail. Without quite appreciating its importance, Richmond noticed that Mr. Lunkowski was standing in front of the room’s only door.

  With perfect nonchalance, Sgt. Morzek sat down on an overstuffed chair, laying his bag across his knees. “Well,” he said, “there was quite a rep
ort on that one. We told them how Stevie was trying to boobytrap a white phosphorous grenade—fix it to go off as soon as some dink pulled the pin instead of four seconds later. And he goofed.”

  Mrs. Lunkowski’s breath whistled out very softly. She said nothing. Morzek waited for further reaction before he smiled horribly and added, “He burned. A couple pounds of willie pete going blooie, well … it keeps burning all the way through you. Like I said, the coffin’s full of gravel.”

  “My god, Morzek,” the captain whispered. It was not the sergeant’s savage grin that froze him but the icy-eyed silence of the three Lunkowskis.

  “The grenade, that was real,” Morzek concluded. “The rest of the report was a lie.”

  Rose Lunkowski reseated herself gracefully on a chair in front of the heavily draped windows. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, sergeant?” she said with a thin smile that did not show her teeth. “There is much we would like to know before you are gone.”

  “Sure,” Morzek agreed, tracing a mottled forefinger across the pigmented callosities on his face. “Not much to tell. The night after Stevie got assigned to my platoon, the dinks hit us. No big thing. Had one fellow dusted off with brass in his ankle from his machine gun blowing up, that was all. But a burst of AK fire knocked Stevie off his tank right at the start.”

  “What’s all this about?” Richmond complained. “If he was killed by rifle fire, why say a grenade—”

  “Silence!” The command crackled like heel plates on concrete.

  Sgt. Morzek nodded. “Why, thank you, Mr. Lunkowski. You see, the captain there doesn’t know the bullets didn’t hurt Stevie. He told us his flak jacket had stopped them. It couldn’t have and it didn’t. I saw it that night, before he burned it—five holes to stick your fingers through, right over the breast pocket. But Stevie was fine, not a mark on him. Well, Christ, maybe he’d had a bandolier of ammo under the jacket. I had other things to think about.”

  Morzek paused to glance around his audience. “All this talk, I could sure use a drink. I killed my bottle back at the Federal Building.”

  “You won’t be long,” the girl hissed in reply.

  Morzek grinned. “They broke up the squadron, then,” he rasped on, “gave each platoon a sector of War Zone C to cover to stir up the dinks. There’s more life on the moon than there was on the stretch we patrolled. Third night out, one of the gunners died. They flew him back to Saigon for an autopsy but damned if I know what they found. Galloping malaria, we figured.

  “Three nights later another guy died. Dawson on three-six … Christ, the names don’t matter. Some time after midnight his track commander woke up, heard him moaning. We got him back to Quan Loi to a hospital, but he never came out of it. The lieutenant thought he got wasp stung on the neck—here, you know?” Morzek touched two fingers to his jugular. “Like he was allergic. Well, it happens.”

  “But what about Stefan?” Mrs. Lunkowski asked. “The others do not matter.”

  “Yes, finish it quickly, sergeant,” the younger woman said, and this time Richmond did catch the flash of her teeth.

  “We had a third death,” Morzek said agreeably, stroking the zipper of his AWOL bag back and forth. “We were all jumpy by then. I doubled the guard, two men awake on every track. Three nights later and nobody in the platoon remembered anything from twenty-four hundred hours till Riggs’ partner blinked at ten of one and found him dead.

  “In the morning, one of the boys came to me. He’d seen Stevie slip over to Riggs, he said; but he was zonked out on grass and didn’t think it really had happened until he woke up in the morning and saw Riggs under a poncho. By then, he was scared enough to tell the whole story. Well, we were all jumpy.”

  “You killed Stefan.” It was not a question but a flat statement.

  “Oh, hell, Lunkowski,” Morzek said absently, “what does it matter who rolled the grenade into his bunk? The story got around and … something had to be done.”

  “Knowing what you know, you came here?” Mrs. Lunkowski murmurred liquidly. “You must be mad.”

  “Naw, I’m not crazy, I’m just sick.” The sergeant brushed his left hand over his forehead. “Malignant melanoma, the docs told me. Twenty-six years in the goddam army and in another week or two I’d be warted to death.

  “Captain,” he added, turning his cancerous face toward Richmond, “you better leave through the window.”

  “Neither of you will leave!” snarled Rose Lunkowski as she stepped toward the men.

  Morzek lifted a fat gray cylinder from his bag. “Know what this is, honey?” he asked conversationally.

  Richmond screamed and leaped for the window. Rose ignored him, slashing her hand out for the phosphorous grenade. Drapery wrapping the captain’s body shielded him from glass and splintered window frame as he pitched out into the yard.

  He was still screaming there when the blast of white fire bulged the walls of the house.

  THE AUTOMATIC RIFLEMAN*

  Coster was waiting for them in the darkened room, hidden by the greater shadow of the couch. His face was as lean and hard-edged as the automatic rifle he held pointed at the door.

  “Where’s the goddam light?” Penske muttered. He found the switch, threw it, and froze with his hand halfway down to the knife in his boot.

  Davidson bumped into Penske from behind and cursed, her lips twisting into the sneer she kept ready when she was around the short man. “Move your—” she began before she saw why Penske had stopped. Then, without hesitation, she cried, “George, look out!”

  “Too late,” said Coster with a bailiff’s smirk and the least motion of the rifle muzzle to bring it to the attention of George Kerr. The black man in suit and tie loomed behind his two companions. His eyes were open and apparently guileless, shuttering a mind that had already realized that the flimsy apartment walls would be no obstacle to rifle bullets. “But we’re all friends here,” Coster went on, his grin broadening.

  “Then I suggest we all come in and discuss matters,” said Kerr in a cultured voice, showing his bad front tooth as he spoke. His fingers touched Davidson’s right elbow and halted the stealthy motion of her hand toward her open purse.

  “Sure,” said Coster, nodding, “but stay bunched in that corner, if you will.” His head and not the rifle twitched a direction. “Until you’re convinced of my good intentions, you’ll be tempted to—put yourselves in danger. We don’t want that.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Penske demanded, shuffling sideways as directed. An angry flush turned his face almost as dark as that of Kerr beside him.

  “My name’s Coster,” the rifleman said. “Agfield told me where I’d find you.”

  Davidson whirled angrily toward Kerr. “I told you not to trust that bastard!” she said. “Somebody ought to take one of his basketballs and stuff it—”

  “Dee, that’s enough,” the big man said, his eyes still on the rifleman. He had closed the hall door softly behind him. Nothing in his manner called attention to the pistol holstered in the small of his back.

  “He said you could use a rifleman for what you had in mind,” Coster amplified. “We’re what you need.”

  “We?” asked Penske tautly. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were as rigid as the bones to which they were anchored, for he recognized even better than the others the menace of the weapon which covered them.

  “Me,” said Coster, “and him.” His left forefinger tapped the gunbarrel where it projected from its wooden shroud. His right hand stayed firm on the rifle’s angled handgrip, finger ready on the trigger.

  Calmly, Kerr said, “Agfield doesn’t know what we have in mind.” His right hand was now loose at his side, no longer restraining Davidson.

  “Sure he does,” said the rifleman, flashing his tight-lipped grin again. “Kawanishi, the Japanese Prime Minister. And I’m here to make sure you get him.”

  For a moment, no one even breathed. Coster leaned forward, his right elbow still gripping the gunstock to his ribs.
He said earnestly, “Look, if I were the police, would I be talking to you? The whole World Proletarian Caucus is right here, right in front of … us. And if it was trials, convictions, they were after—the evidence is on you, or at least outside in your car. You blew away a teller in La Prensa, and you’ve still got the gun, don’t you? And the one that killed that little girl in Mason City?”

  Davidson mumbled a curse and looked hot-eyed at Penske.

  “But we’re friends,” Coster repeated. Very deliberately, he rotated the automatic rifle so that its muzzle brake pointed at the ceiling. The rubber butt rested on his thigh.

  “Friends,” said Kerr. “Then we should get comfortable.” He took off his suit coat and turned, as deliberate as Coster, to drape it over the back of a chair. The grip of the big Colt was a square black silhouette against his light shirt.

  Everyone eased a little. Coster laid the rifle across his knees, one hand still caressing the receiver of the weapon. Davidson and Penske both lit cigarettes, the latter by flicking the head of a kitchen match with his thumbnail. He tossed the wooden sliver toward a wastebasket. It missed, but he ignored it as it continued to smoulder on the cheap carpet.

  Kerr took one of the straight chairs from the kitchen-dinette and sat backwards on it, facing in toward the living room and Coster. The pistol did not gouge at him that way. “Penske, why don’t you bring things in from the van,” he said.

  The short man glowered, but his expression suddenly cleared and he walked to the door. “I’ll knock when I want you to open,” he said as he left the room.

  Davidson moved over beside Kerr, her fingertips brushing the point of his shoulder. “You sound very confident about your ability to use that gun,” the big man said with a gesture toward the oddly-shaped rifle. “But I don’t know that I’d care to make plans based on something … suppositious.”

  Coster’s tongue clicked in amusement. “Do you want references? Somebody who saw us put away Kennedy? Or King?”

  Davidson snorted a puff of smoke. “You don’t look like a fool,” Kerr said.